We have been building roll cages for race cars at Vorshlag for more than a dozen years, and it is never fun. It is very time consuming, involves a lot of engineering for layout and material choices, takes real math and measurement during construction, tube bending and notching, then a good bit of welding. We wrote about the costs of a building a proper roll cage back in 2015 in this thread, and it has racked up 25K reads. There were a number of shop owners who reached out and said they raised their prices after reading this, and the text we wrote even ended up verbatim on somebody’s website…
Over the past few years in this industry, something has changed – a select few Motorsports fabricators have fully embraced modern technology with and 3D scans of cages, CAD designed tubing, and CNC bent + notched “cage kits”. We have utilized “cage kits” here at Vorshlag in the past, but our latest experience with a kit from Trackspec Motorsports for our shop 2015 Mustang “Trigger” was an amazing experience. We wrote up some of our experiences in this updated forum post.
Everything from the kit just fit perfectly – every tube was bent to fit tightly to the chassis every notch lined up with the marks on the tubes with very tight gaps, and over the course of 15 hours logged we had the floor prepped, plinth blocks placed, and the entire cage installed and tack welded! That included some tricky dash cuts for the A-pillar pass-thrus, shown in the video below.
We managed to get some good images and video clips over the 2.5 days spent prepping the chassis and installing the Trackspec S550 cage kit, which you can see in this 7 minute video. Then we added to our original “roll cages cost money” forum post with additional content on this and another cage kit install we had done on an E46 coupe. We do not have the “right fabricator” on staff to scratch build a roll cage to this level of quality, so for the foreseeable future we will be using pre-bent cage kits for all of the race cars we build. Using one of these CNC built kits saves time, saves money, and gets you a more consistently high quality / tighter fitting cage than a scratch built cage could hope for.