Vince's Stuff: Despite some hiccups, the Civic is performing on track

Since the super wet Wednesday at the track at Tremblant, I managed to get to two Monday nights at St-Eustache. The little hesitation when I get on the throttle was still present, even though I didn't have the problem of the engine cutting out at certain RPM. I also changed the driver door after a pleasant trip to Kenny U-Pull. It was like hunter for treasure looking for a red Civic door in decent condition. The one I got was not bad. The window still needs a bit of help to seal properly, but it is a huge improvement. It took me almost an hour to change the stupid door lock, but only 10 minutes to change the actual door, once I got the fender off.

New door coming up!

I felt I was driving well on the first Monday, and I got in a lot of laps, but I couldn't even break into the 1:02's. I managed a best of only 1:03.5 and decided I would take the car to Pat's before my next time on track to see if we could figure out what the problem was.

JAG photo of the Civic at St-Eustache

Civic in action

Pat hooked the car up to his laptop and found codes for the throttle position sensor and the distributor. By unplugging the TPS and plugging it back in, something improved. I ordered a new one and will rebuild my distributor with parts I have from an old one to see if that will get rid of the problem.

I went back to the track Monday. In my first session, I could not even get into the 1:03's. The best I could do was 1:04.6, which was pretty depressing, considering I had managed a 1:02.7 in the spring. Where would those 2 seconds come from? A quick look at the lap data indicated I was probably down on power. It was very hot out, but I was still perplexed. Imagine my surprise, then, when on my warmup lap in the second session, I clocked a 1:03.9, followed by a 1:02.48 and a 1:02.50. I was really astounded. Those turned out to be my best laps, as the tires seem to only deliver for a couple of laps before the performance drops off slightly.

It took me a while to improve on my times from the spring, but I finally feel like I'm headed in the right direction. It seems totally realistic to drop into the 1:01's with some cooler weather. Can the car go even faster than 1:01? I hope so, but that would require shaving off another 1.5 seconds, which is a tall order. Stay tuned...

Other than that, I bought the cooling fan parts I need to fix the M3 at Adriatic Auto... they seem to be able to fix any European car there... there was even a Tatra parked out front! I just have to budget the time to do the repair.

Rare RS4

Not so rare AMG GTS

Spotted at Kenny U-Pull... I think there is a decent chance this was my father's old Jaguar XJ6L... they were very rare in Quebec, especially in brown. It was listed as a 1977, and my Dad's was a 1976, but still...