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| Civic on track at ICAR, photo by Jean Sirota |
I am only now writing about my last track event of 2022, but it took place way back on October 23rd. I was invited to Perry Performance's annual end of season "Friends and Family" track day at ICAR, where I would have access to many sessions with the Civic. Because the event was on a Sunday, I decided to spend the first part of the weekend at the country house and then attend the second half of the track day. I arranged for Choo to bring the car to the event earlier, so he could get in some laps, given that his own Civic had a blown engine (from the Mosport event).
When I arrived around lunch time, I was eager to join the others on the track. Rob was there with his M3, and there were several fellow instructors there who I knew. Many of them had cars of a similar performance level to my own. I was eager to hear what Choo thought of the car. He had only been out in one session. He said it felt very different from his Civic on track (not in a good way, I think!) but that it made for an extremely pleasant street car.
I was of course hoping to improve on my personal best lap time and get into the 1:45's. It took me until the before last session to do so, when I managed a 1:45.76 while driving in a super fun five-car train made up of Dave Gosselin's Champcar Civic Si, Pascal's K24-powered Integra, a Mk.5 Golf GTi, and Kevin's B-series EK Coupe race car. I was not able to pass any cars in the train, but they never managed to pull away either. When I have some time, I'll edit the video of that session. It was one of the most fun sessions I had on track all year, and reminded me of the old "Vince vs. Pascal" sessions we used to have at St-Eustache, Tremblant or Mosport (see my Youtube channel). I was trying to focus on improving one particular aspect of my driving, which was easing up on my grip on the steering wheel. It's not that easy to relax your hands when you have no power steering!
I think I was driving pretty well. The car never missed a beat and this is the first time in a while I was able to drive home from my last event and park the car in a condition where it is ready for its first event in the Spring.
It was a great way to end the season. Even though my 2022 season started late, I managed to participate in a decent number of events, all the while with a super reliable car. I can only hope I have as much fun next year!
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| Pascal's Integra |
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| Rob's car and mine |
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| M3 and EP3 |
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| Clean Integra Type R |
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| Antoine's Type R, the very car we used at our wedding in 2005! |
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| My old Civic... Carl had brought out many of his cars |
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| My Civic between sessions |
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| Two Corollas! |
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| There was a cool mix of cars at the event |
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| Super nice NSX beside my Civic |
