Our first track day of the year was the twilight event with Driving Solutions, Josh was interested towards the end of last year and we ended up essentially booking out the entire Beginner session!
For the majority of us, it was the first time on the Gardner GP circuit, myself included and having never driven the EK on track, it probably wasn’t the most confidence inspiring of evenings for me.
All of that doesn’t really matter though when you’re having a good time with friends, and the format of the evening was smooth and fast-paced, kudos to the organisers for minimising the number of groups which in turn diluted the waiting time between sessions.
The environment was relaxed, everybody went out there doing their own thing and the evening weather made the experience much more pleasant. It was a good chuckle parking an entire garage full of Hondas next to the supercars next door.
One slight annoyance was the lack of laps. For beginners in low-powered cars the track takes close to two minutes to complete, and with sessions kept between ten- to twelve-minutes in duration, once we began to get into rhythm the session was over. Particularly if you were one of the last ones out, in a group of twenty-five cars there were drivers commencing their first hot lap by the time the laggards left the pit lane for their out lap.
I was one of them at the back, but my frustrations were borne out of my incredibly slow pace. I purposely kept the timing out of my evening so I could just come to grips with the circuit and the car, but maybe this lackadaisical approach prevented me from really pushing it towards the end of the evening and find key learnings backed by data.
Having never driven FWD in an aggressive manner prior, all my understanding of vehicle dynamics when cornering went out the window. The M3 was my reference point, which over the course of the evening made it clear that I was dealing with a different beast in the Honda altogether.
The BMW weighs over 500KG more than my EK, has double the power going through the rear wheels, and it was difficult to shake this as a beginner driver. Every start of corner had me worrying about the rear end stepping out from too much steering input or heavy throttle inputs.
Halfway through each corner, I would have the exact same realisation that I was driving a FWD, low-powered Honda weighing nothing, chucking it around and keeping the throttle planted was the way to go.
I couldn’t cement this realisation all night, and kept resetting myself every session, every lap, the same epiphany over and over again…
Add to that the ratios of the B18C2 gearbox being so long meant that any over-slowing (which there was a lot of) ruined an entire sequence of corners as I would drop out of the power band, the elevation changes making it difficult for my car to get going again speedily.
Talking to Renel the next morning, a couple key points were learnt. Entry speed and corner speed was what I needed to focus on (duh Kelvin, it’s got no power), drive the car with reckless abandon to maximise the powertrain and chassis, and perhaps look into updating the final drive and invest in an LSD to get what power the car has down into the road.
I need more seat time, learn how to drive the car and find the limit, which I don’t think I got near on the evening.
Hopefully a lot more track days can be mapped out with the Civic this year. I see where the rewards and the fun can be had, but unfortunately this first experience was a culmination of wrong place, wrong time, wrong car.