Vince's Stuff: A Beautiful Day at Tremblant

The Civic in its natural environment

Yesterday I brought the Civic out to Tremblant for some track time at a BMW club of Quebec high performance driver education event. I have to thank Alex for being extremely understanding, in that yesterday was also her birthday, yet she was totally fine with the idea of me being gone all morning and half the evening!

Pat had been working on the car for a couple of days (one thing he did was remove 40 pounds of non-functioning air conditioning parts!) but he only told me the morning before the event that my front brake pads were toast... I reorganized my day and headed over to Perry Performance to get some Hawk pads from Carl. I went for a real race pad, the DTC-60, since the "street/race" pads I installed this spring really did not last (although they performed well). The DTC-60's performed flawlessly right out of the box.

The car had a small recurring issue where it would misfire at certain RPM... it almost felt like fuel starvation. The issue came and went in the first couple of sessions, which made me more hesitant to really lean on the car, as it is quite unsettling when the throttle cuts out when you are trying to accelerate and keep the rear of the car firmly planted.

I had a great time on track and ended up running most of six sessions on track. I was not able to beat my personal best time set last year, which may be due to the warmer temperature affecting horsepower, or to my driving conservatively. When I compare the data to last year, I can see that my top speed at the end of the straight was lower yesterday by 3-5 km/h...

Clearly, I had one of the lowest powered cars there, so I wasn't really keeping up with the other instructors' cars. That's OK, I am having a good time just being there. Still, I would really like a fresh engine, which makes all the horsepower it's supposed to make and doesn't burn a half liter of oil every session. Othwerise, I am happy with the ergonomics, the handling, the braking, the safety equipment and the general appearance of the car. As a project, the car is almost "complete".

I also felt the satisfaction of driving to and from the track... I love that my car still has a license plate and a radio and is functional as a street car. I also love to see other cars from the event on the road home (I drove a while with a lovely red E46 M3 on the way home).

Apart from the misfire and the oil consumption, the car was great. I had a nice exchange with an E36 M3 in the final session and I dropped the car at ICAR on the way home so Pat could get in some laps to reward him for his hard work on the car.

I got to complete the last leg of the trip home in the much more comfortable Saab, which Pat had driven to ICAR so we could make the exchange. I was home before 7:00 pm, in time to enjoy Alex's birthday dessert. All in all, it was a very satisfying day, despite the less than stellar lap times.