Vince's Stuff: Track season starts early

It's been snowing for 2 days... hard to believe after the 20+ degree weather we have seen on certain days.

Photo from yesterday, unexpected snow

As planned, I pulled the Civic out of storage on April 1st. I had to wait a few additional days before I was able to get the BMW out of the barn at the country house, since the barn doors were still frozen in ice. When it was possible to take out the BMW, I parked the Saab at the country house, where it is now sitting. The plan is to sell the Saab in the next few weeks to make way for a new winter car for next season.

The BMW was put away in good working condition and all seems well now that I have swapped on the summer wheels. There is still an intermittent check engine for a throttle position sensor, but the car is working fine and is not leaking oil anywhere.

As for the Civic, I had put it away in working condition. On my last track day in November, there had been no vtec engagement issue on my last session and I had hoped that the issue was solved when I properly secured a wire to the vtec solenoid.

Amazingly, there are two local tracks (Riverside and ICAR) which have began hosting track events as of a couple of weeks ago, so I was eager to head out with the Civic. I was able to head to ICAR this past Tuesday for a couple of sessions. ICAR decided to start the Tuesday lapping at 1:00 pm instead of 5:00, so people could get in some track time despite the 8:00 pm curfew.

I managed to get to the track at about 2:00 pm and was chatting with the owner of a nice Mazda RX8 R3 while I emptied the car.

There were not many people on track at that hour, but at least that meant I could gather some useful data without my lap times being affected by other drivers. My plan was to take it easy for a few laps to make sure everything was in order. The car felt good. The front end was not gripping that well in the slower corners, but the car felt stable where it counted in the faster corners. After a few laps, the vtec issue appeared again. The engine would drop out of vtec then it would return. This got worse as the session went on. I managed a 1:48.06, about 1.5 seconds off my best laps of last season. On that lap, I clearly had full power, as I hit 168 km/h on the back straight. I was on a mid-1:47 when I lost power on the start-finish straight. I just decided to focus on running clean laps and see how much speed I could maintain in the corners. I never managed to hit the rev limiter in 4th gear, which shows that the engins was not pulling as strongly as it did in November.

I went out for 2 more sessions, but the problem persisted, so I was losing about 15 km/h at the end of each straight. Still, I managed laps in the 1:48's in each session, despite the power loss, so I was feeling good about the overall performance of the car (and the driver). With less power, I was getting on the gas earlier at the start of the super long right-hander, and this generated some of my best speeds ever in that corner. I have to remember to get on the gas more aggressively after the hairpin at the end of the back straight.

There were no other issues, so I was pretty satisfied with my afternoon. The issue is likely an electronic or voltage issue, and Pat says we will run a couple of new wires to the vtec components. I hope we find the solution quickly. You can't see if the problem is solved with street driving, as the problem doesn't manifest on the street. I assume there is a heat component to the issue. I will drop the car off at Pat's tomorrow so he can take a look at it.