Two hours into a July race at Bristol, an aluminum bench stops being a seat and starts being a test of character. I sat on bare metal for years before Linda and I bought two Everlasting Comfort stadium seats with back support ahead of the spring race two seasons ago. My left knee has been bad since my machinist days, and cold aluminum does it no favors at all. Neither does sitting with nothing behind your back for four hours while the cars go around.
Nothing about this gear is complicated. It is a memory foam cushion with an adjustable backrest that folds flat and carries like a briefcase. No batteries, no assembly, nothing to figure out in the dark at six in the morning in a parking lot. But after two seasons of hauling ours through the gates at Bristol in the spring and Talladega in the fall, I can tell you exactly what changes when you stop sitting on the bench itself and start sitting on a seat. Here are ten of them, in the order I would rank them if a friend asked me in the infield.
A bench is not a chair. This turns it into one.
Memory foam, an adjustable backrest, and 2.2 pounds of carry weight. It is the difference between watching the race and enduring it.
Amazon Check Today's Price on Amazon →Your lower back gets a backrest instead of a bench edge
The back is padded and it adjusts, so you can set it upright while the cars are under green and ease it back a notch during a long caution. On bare aluminum your spine curls around the front lip of the bench for the better part of four hours, and you feel it before the race is half over. This was the first change I noticed, and it is the one Linda brings up every time we walk out of a track. My back has never been the problem. My knee is. But sitting upright changed how the whole day felt by the time we got to the truck.
Memory foam takes the sting out of a hard bench
High-density memory foam sits between you and the metal. It does not flatten out the way a folded blanket does by lap 100, and that is the whole difference between padding and no padding at all. My left knee has been bad since my machinist years, and the ache that used to show up around the halfway point of a race stopped showing up once we had these under us. I still feel every concrete step on the way in. I do not feel the bench anymore.
No armrests means two seats sit flush side by side
Linda and I set ours down next to each other and the armless design lets them meet in the middle with no gap and no fight over elbow room. If you have ever shared a bench with a stranger who decided half of it was his, you know why that matters. Two of these sit shoulder to shoulder like they were built for it, because they were. Ours have been side by side at Bristol and up in the stands at Talladega, and neither of us has ever had to ask the other one to scoot over.
At 2.2 pounds, Linda carries her own
The Everlasting Comfort seat weighs 2.2 pounds. That is light enough that Linda carries hers from the Silverado to the gate and I carry mine, and neither of us has to make a second trip. Two seats, the cooler, and the scanner bag is still one walk from where we parked. If you have ever watched a couple in their sixties argue about who is lugging what up a ramp, you understand why a light seat is worth more than a fancy one.
It folds flat, so it lives behind the truck seat
Between races ours fold flat and slide behind the back seat, under a blanket and a bag of tie downs. No shelf in the garage, no bin in the basement, no hunting for them the Thursday before a race weekend. They have been in the truck since March and I have not thought about them once until we were parked and walking toward the gate. That is what I want out of gear at this point in my life. Nothing to remember, nothing to maintain, nothing to fix.
The carrying strap keeps one hand free at the gate
There is a built-in carrying strap, so it rides over a shoulder and your other hand stays open for the ticket and the cooler. I have watched people climb concrete steps with a seat clamped under one arm and a drink in the other, and it never ends well. Having a hand free on a damp aluminum stair tread is not a small thing when you are 61 and carrying somebody else's soda up to row 30.
A storage pocket keeps the scanner off the aluminum
The seat has a storage pocket, and mine holds my handheld scanner and my phone instead of letting them slide around on the bench where I will knock them off the second the crowd stands up. It is not a cargo system and it is not trying to be. It is a place for two things so they are where you left them when you reach for them. That is the whole job, and it does the whole job.
The polyester cover wipes clean with a damp rag
Dust, a spilled soda, a little mustard from a hot dog. A damp rag handles all of it and the seat goes back in the truck instead of into the wash. After a hot Sunday at Talladega everything you carried in smells like the track, and being able to wipe the seat down and stow it dry is the difference between gear that gets used again next season and gear that ends up in the garage behind the mower.
It stays put when you stand up for a caution
Ours sit on the aluminum and stay where we put them when we stand for a restart or a wreck. Nobody wants to be the person chasing a cushion down three rows during a green flag pit stop, and I have seen it happen more than once. The bench is a hard, flat, unforgiving surface, and a seat that will not stay on it is worse than no seat at all. Two seasons in, ours have not wandered an inch.
Two seasons in, they still fold and carry the same
Both of ours have been to four race weekends, a handful of Friday night football games, and a couple of parades where we got there early and stayed late. The foam has not flattened into a pancake and the strap has not given out. I figured we would be replacing them by now. We are not. A pair of Everlasting Comfort seats has outlasted every other thing we have carried into a grandstand, and Linda has already informed me that they are going back to Bristol with us in the spring whether I remember to load them or not.
What I'd Skip
I would skip anything without a back. A flat bleacher cushion helps for about an hour and then you are still folding your spine around the bench, which is the part that actually hurts. I would also skip the inflatable kind. I watched a man reinflate his twice during a hot afternoon at Talladega, and by the time the checkered flag came out he was sitting on bare aluminum anyway.
My knee still complains on the walk from the truck to the gate. It quit complaining about the bench two seasons ago.
And I would not buy the cheapest folding seat on the rack. The strap is usually the first thing to give, and you find that out in a parking lot with your hands full and a hundred people behind you. Two Everlasting Comfort seats have done four race weekends for us without a single repair, which is more than I can say for the pair of bargain seats they replaced.
If you had to stand still a second before you could walk, you know
That pause after four hours on aluminum is exactly what a padded seat with an adjustable back is for. Ours go to Bristol again in the spring.
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