Vince's Stuff: Mosport: as fun as ever, luck with weather, and a new personal best lap time!

Our cars in the paddock, driven to the track 500 km each way

I try to get to the three major tracks within a 500 km radius of home at least once a year: Tremblant, Calabogie and Mosport. In actual fact, I most often fail, for whatever reason: track car reliability or availability, budget constraints or time constraints. This year, I got in a few laps at Calabogie on the lunch break of our school and I did not manage to get to Tremblant. We were out of the country for the first half of summer, and when we got back, the car was not back from its refresh for another five weeks. It was therefore quite important for me to make it out to what has maybe been my favourite event of the past years (given that I don't have a car that can participate in club racing): the Perry Performance Thanksgiving weekend at Mosport. Carl organizes a fantastic event year after year, and there are three days to choose from on the long weekend. Rob and I decided to run on the Saturday only, and we were praying for good weather. The forecast was looking not that great, but in the end, we lucked out: it did not rain at all during the Saturday portion of the event.

Last year was the first time I had been to Mosport in 6 years ( Story here ) and I had managed my lifetime best lap time, a 1:40.77, but had come away disappointed with not cracking the 1:40 mark. Based on the performances of my friends in their Civics, I should have been able to do a 1:39 or better... it was not to be. Of course, I was very motivated to try again this year, and the car had a few improvements (including an LSD) that should make it possible. I know it's maybe not the best strategy to arrive at a track day with a specific lap time in mind, but I really wanted to meet this challenge. When watching the video of last year, I can see that I was slow in corners 2 and 4 (for me, the two scariest corners) and there was surely a second to be gained there.

We left Montreal before rush hour on Friday. Rob was driving his lovely E36 M3 while I was in the Civic with Choo, who would be sharing the car, since his Civic has not recovered from its blown engine at last year's Mosport event. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express at Bowmanville and arrived at the track in plenty of time for the driver's meeting. Carl warned us about the cold track in the morning, and of course, he was right to do so.

While doing a bolt check on the Civic, Choo noticed that one of the axle boots was ripped and that the axle had lost a ton of grease as a result. On top of that, he said there was play in the axle now. I was a bit pissed that we had not checked this in Montreal, especially since Choo had spare axles at home, but we tried to switch to problem-solving mode. I was not very useful here, but Choo was. He found some axle grease (thanks Kevin) and used a tie wrap to re-seal the boot at a point past the rip. He was worried about the small amount of play in the axle, but it turned out to be a non issue. The car ran reliably all day.

By the time this was done, the first session was just rolling onto the track. There was no pressure to maximize every minute of each session, since we had access to 7 sessions of 30 minutes each. Thirty minutes on a race track is a lot, so 210 minutes is a very generous amount of track time. I took it easy on the first laps, as the track was cold (but dry) and did not inspire a ton of confidence. I was in the advanced group, and I felt like I was the slowest car out there (maybe I was). There were several Porsches in the group, GT4's, GT3's and a couple of race 911's. My first laps were in the 1:50's and I eventually managed a 1:47 near the end of the session. It was hard to imagine that I would be able to shave 8 more seconds off my time in the later sessions!

The second session was uneventful, I was still getting passed non stop. The car felt good and I was able to confidently apply throttle in turn 2 without the front end washing out, probably because of the newly installed LSD. When I got passed by Cayman GT4's running together, I was sometimes able to get a tow and my top speed on my best lap was 204 km/h. I managed a best lap of 1:41.66. I made myself not brake at all for turn 4, and this worked just fine. I did of course lift off the throttle, for quite a long pause. When I used to race at Mosport with my 1.6 liter Civic, I was able to take that corner flat out and get to the braking point at 177 km/h. My data shows that on my best laps, I was now only managing 163, so there is probably a time loss there from not carrying enough speed through corner 4. Still, I was satisfied with the session. The car felt good, and I felt quite confident I would get into the 1:39's at some point in the day. The car was using a ridiculous amount of fuel, given the very high average speeds.

By the third session, I knew there was no excuse not to go sub 1:40. The track was warming up and there were no issues with the car. I was going more and more quickly. Lap 8 was a 1:40.99, lap 11 was a 1:40.59 (new personal best), lap 13, unbelievably, was a 1:40.00! Fortunately, on my next lap, I did it, a 1:39.89. Finally! I felt that whatever else happened in the day, I had accomplished what I had set out to do. I had a leisurely lunch and even lay down in the grass and dozed off for a while.

In my 4th session, I didn't go any faster but in my 5th session, I managed a 1:39.14, one of three laps in the 1:39's. Of course, this meant that I should be able to hit the 1:38's, right? I came very close on my last lap of the 6th session, with a 1:39.01. Come on! Was I really going to have to wait until 2024 to hit the 1:38's? There was only one session left to do it.

The last session of the day was going well, I hit the 1:39's on laps 3,5,6,7 and 9. Then, on lap 11, I could see my delta was in the negative and that there was a real shot of improving, but at the end of the straight, I was catching up to one of the 911 race cars that seemed to be on a cooldown lap. I was yelling in the car... it was not slow enough for me to pass it into turn 8, and I was sure I was going to lose time behind it. Looking at the video, I think I did lose a couple of tenths of a second there, but I was still able to manage a 1:38.68. I was very happy with this, and decided to call it a day at that point. Why push my luck? I had driven a whole bunch of laps in the day and I had managed a satisfactory lap time with maybe 10 minutes left in the last session. I still needed to drive home in the car...

So was I one of the fast cars in my group? Still no. I was not even the fastest Civic (I think Jérémi Martel was). There were people who had never been to Mosport who were faster than me in Golf R's. I can see in the video where I can go faster (still turns 2 and 4) but if I compare my speeds with data from other years, I went the fastest ever in corners 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10. I was 4km/h short of my best ever in turn 1, 6 km/h short in turn 2 and 14 km/h short just before turn 5. Those "record" speeds were achieved with a lighter car, on R-compound tires, but there is no reason I shouldn't be able to eventually match them with this Civic in optimal conditions.

All in all, it was a very satisfying way to end the season. There is only one more event, Perry's track day at ICAR this Saturday, but it looks like it might rain, a lot. If the season is already over then, I'm OK with it. As I have mentioned before, I like putting the car away for winter in pretty much ready-for-Spring condition (of course, we will need an axle, an oil change, maybe some new brake lines...).

Here is a video of my last 3 laps of the day: