We've had great weather this month and I'm trying to make sure we all spend as much time outdoors as possible before the cold hits. The rare and exotic cars are still around too.
9-month-old Oscar can stand up when he has support
Jules enjoys a very long slide in the Mont Tremblant village
Track-oriented CRX in Old Montreal
Crap photo, but my ideal 635 Csi: white with no black rubber rear spoiler
A pristine Porsche 965
I love the wheels on the later RX8's
I think the RCF looks pretty cool
I don't love MGB's, but this one just looks right
Is the Fiat 500 too tall? Yes, clearly
The Corvette Z06 looks seriously exotic
Nice striped C63 Coupe
I don't love the M4, but it looks surprisingly good in red...
I see this Jaguar XKR-S every week, and I still think it looks awesome
Jules enjoys some quality time in the race car while it sits in our garage
Thanks to Carl and Alex, I was able to attend a lapping day organized by and for Club Civic Quebec. Except for a couple of laps in a student's car this past spring, I hadn't driven on a track for a year. At the same event last year, I had achieved my personal best lap ever in the Civic (under 1:00.1). Was it realistic that I would break that record? Not really. Although Carl and Sajan have carried out work on the Civic to make it more reliable, they did not try to add any performance. Sajan told me that they had used the car recently at St-Eustache and were lapping in the 1:01 range. The car was wearing some pretty old Hankook RS3 tires, which would be the limiting factor as far as the car's performance went. The other limiting factor would be the driver, who might be a bit rusty!
The Civic is ready for action
My goal for the first session was to ease into things and get down into the 1:02 range. After a few laps, this was achieved. However, at one point, the car snapped into oversteer just after the entry to the carousel. I headed off track on the inside, and quickly reentered the track. Unfortunately, the grass is not level with the track, and this involved hitting the equivalent of a curb at a decent rate of speed. The result was a flat tire and a dented wheel (sorry Carl!). I limped back to the pits and installed my only spare (luckily, it was the same model of tire and the same size and offset wheel).
In the next session, I was taking it easy in the carousel, yet the same thing happened again (without the flat tire). In the following sessions, I simply took it very easy at that portion of the track. After a while, the issue seemed to have resolved itself (Pascal theorized it might be a sticking brake caliper). There were six sessions available to us, but I hoped to have a good fifth session, then call it a day, so I could be home early enough to make dinner.
In the last session, everything finally came together. I had several good laps, there was no weird oversteer, and I managed a best lap of 1:00.7. Of course, I could have driven more smoothly and maybe knocked off a couple of tenths, but I knew that it was not realistic to break my record with these tires. I packed up the car satisfied with my day.
I still love the Civic. It's hard to imagine a different newer Civic becoming my track car. There were several really nice 2002-2005 EP3 Civics and some 2006 and up Si's. The owners of these cars had spent a lot of money, and they just didn't seem as fast as Carl's car. The fastest Si was supercharged. That is a very expensive modification. I drove a student's Si sedan with several bolt-on engine upgrades, and it just felt very sluggish. I guess it was a bit of an eye opener: newer cars are heavy, and they need a lot more power to feel quick and generate good lap times.
I don't need all that stuff that makes a car heavy in my Civic. Yami, one of the instructors, was lapping in 1:01.5 in a 90's Civic hatch with a non-vtec 1.8 liter. It seems the number one option for me, as far as my next track car goes, is to hope Carl will eventually sell me back my old Civic... I think with the right tires, the car can do the magic 59-second lap (and maybe even 58, in the right conditions).
