Vince's Stuff: Finally back on track!

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Finally back on track!

Last Tuesday, I finally managed to take the Civic back out on the track at ICAR. The last step after the engine installation was to have the car tuned on the dyno by Sajan. Pat brought him the car and I picked it up the followiong day. The final horsepower figure was disappointing, 192 hp (compared to 214 for the H23 in my old car back in 2014), but the car felt quick.

I didn't need to adjust or change any settings on the car. Even the tires had held the same pressures as used in my last session at ICAR when we had the engine problems in June. I noticed that the car was leaking a lot of oil from near the oil pan, but this was not enough of an issue to miss the last chance to test the car before my track day at Tremblant scheduled for September 7th.

I got to the track super early (around 3:30 pm) so I would avoid traffic. I managed to work with my lap top while a few race cars enjoyed a testing session. In fact, I found out that if I brought my race suit and arrived at noon, I could pay a flat fee of 150$ and lap all afternoon. It would not have been worth it to pay the flat fee at the time I arrived, however. I chatted with another driver to find out what he thought of the new 2020 configuration. He said that he liked it and that it was 4 or 5 seconds faster than last year's (others had told me 1 second, so I was a bit confused). A large variety of cool cars showed up, from modified old Civics to Porsches and Mclarens. I really like this aspect of the ICAR evenings.

I registered for the evening and was ready for the very first session a bit before 6:00 pm. The car felt fine but I was rusty. The acceleration and gearing were excellent. I was letting most cars pass me, and it took me a while to get into a groove. I finally managed some clean laps when I managed to hang onto a Camaro after it passed me and I managed my best lap ever at ICAR, at 1:48.52, which was quite a bit faster than the 1:50.25 I had managed in June. My top speeds were the same or better than those of June, which makes me think this H22 is making close to the same power as the H23 was.

Pat joined me at the track and went out for a session as it was getting quite dark. For once, he didn't beat my time, which made sense, since it was pretty dark and he couldn't see the few reference points on the track. We noticed a drop in oil pressure in left-hand corners and this worried Pat, even though the pressure was no lower than at idle. We will have to keep an eye on this in the future. Also, the oil leak was pretty bad after we parked the car.

There are still things to work on with both car and driver, but the season seems to have resumed on a positive note.