Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

Rolf Brauch, the nice man who designed our circulation software, came to visit on Friday. We hear he designed some cool new programs and sorts for us.

Hear the banging of hammers this weekend? That was a construction crew. Thanks to their efforts, Steve is no longer working in the corner of our storage room, as he now has a real, live office.

The Sentra SE-R and both Civics have been on the receiving end of some love lately. Check out the updates on our entire project car fleet.

In your face, Atkins.

Here’s a breakdown of the components that we’ve pulled out of the car so far; most are self explanitory. Since Honda-Challenge requires using the stock battery location, we pulled the battery relocation kit from the car. And as the Civic is now the towee instead of the tow-er, we removed the tow hitch. There’s more to be removed, as the car still has air conditioning and who knows what else living under the hood.

If you’re going to yoink the HTML and copy this table somewhere else, please remember to include a link to GRM. Thanks!

The Classic Motorsports Mitty takes place this weekend at Road Atlanta. In addition to the HSR vintage races, we’ll be throwing a party of sorts on the infield: MINI Cooper and Lotus Elan autocross drives, concours, technical seminars and more. For complete details, see the Classic Motorsports Mitty page.

Once again, Mark at Kirk Racing comes through with a fantastic cage.

The welds are particularly top notch, we’ll be painting it soon to protect the steel.

The car is back from Kirk Racing, see if you can identify what’s different about the interior! (Hint: You’d have a hard time playing dodgeball in there now.)

The moonroof assembly was heavy, high up and in the way of where the cage wants to be. Goodbye, moonroof.

Clean as a whistle up top now.

You could play a game of dodgeball in there now, it’s so cavernous.

We’ve got a great big Honda convoy — off we go to Kirk Racing!

We spent much of last week stripping the interior out of the Civic, getting it ready for a trip to Kirk Racing for its cage. There weren’t many headaches in pulling out the interior. The only components that stumped us momentarily were the rear seats (A trip to Honda-Tech.com educated us about a small panel towards the center of the seats where some bolts are holding things together) and the passenger-side airbag (there’s lots of stuff hidden behind the glovebox, but we guessed correctly which of the three bolts were holding the airbag in place). The car is currently up at Kirk Racing getting its cage installed. We’re going to steal the office scale when we get a moment and weigh all the stuff we took out.

If you’re ever passing through Palatka, Fla., stop for a bite at Angel’s dinner.

The Civic has been running well lately, and thanks for asking. It’s still a few different shades of red, meaning we’re still waiting for paint. We originally decided to wait until the car was all one shade of red before doing the suspension work, but that plan is about to be bagged as we’re tired of scraping the door handles during autocross events.

On April 9, we ran the Martin Sports Car Club’s MiniPrix, a high-speed autocross event that has been part of the club’s schedule for decades–as in since the 1960s. We finished third in our three-car class (go team), but took comfort in the fact that we were only about one second off the winner on the high-speed, 60-second course.

The event took place at Gainesville Raceway’s road course, and the long, long sweepers meant we spent considerable time on two bumpstops at a time. The fender lips just barely kissed the sidewalls of our tires. No permanent damage was done, but some static negative camber should cure things.

On the way home, we stopped at Angel’s Diner in Palatka. It’s supposed to be the oldest diner in the state. If you go there, get the onion rings.

The following weekend we were at the DeLand Airport for an SCCA event. We finished fourth out of six cars. (One guy never ran, so technically there were only five of us competing.) One day we’ll have suspension.

We have been running 35 psi up front and 37 psi in the rear. The car actually felt a little nervous when going through the fast sweepers, so we lowered the rears to 35 psi.

While our car is not yet an autocross machine, it has been pretty darn reliable for day-to-day use. In fact, we were recently thinking about that exact fact while driving to Sears this past Saturday.

About two seconds after completing that thought, the car started to feel sluggish. Was it just our imagination? Was driving other cars during the week making us forget how the Civic really felt?

Since we were in traffic, we really couldn’t open it up to see how the car behaved under wide-open throttle. We eventually had a chance to goose the throttle, and yep, something was amiss. (Get it? Something was a- “miss?”)

Plus the idle was quickly getting worse. The car seemed to go from sluggish to really bad in about 5 minutes time. It wasn’t like something just failed. Rather, it felt like something was coming undone.

In theory, these two components should be linked together.

A fresh set of spark plug wires cured our engine miss and got us back on track.

We turned around, came home, popped the hood and took a look. A car needs air, fuel and spark to run, and since we have experienced our fair share of ignition problems before, that’s where we started. Something told us that we were missing a spark or two.

We figured it would be prudent to start with the basics and see if the plug wires were at least tight. One, two and three all seemed fine. When we pulled the fourth plug wire from the distributor, the rubber boot came off just fine, but something was left behind–the metal terminal had separated from the wire itself. The car ran no better or worse with the offending plug wire completely removed, so we figured we found the cause.

Fortunately RIDE of Daytona had a set of Accel 300+ ThunderSport plug wires in stock for our application, so we were set. According to Accel, these wires feature a Kevlar inner core, copper-nickel alloy conductor, graphite coating and a silicone insulation. All of those components are then wrapped by a fiberglass braid and then a silicone jacket. RIDE had both yellow and blue wires in stock. We figure the blue ones would make us go faster.

At first, we only replaced the one bad wire. The car felt better but not perfect. After installing the entire set, the car was back to its normal self. We need to check all of the plug wires, but it seems like we had one fail and another on the way. We’ll do some more research on this.

In other Civic news, we have noticed that the local birds seem to enjoy using the car as a toilet. (They also like to poop on the backyard deck, which is gross.)

To see if we can gently get our feathered friends to take a hint, we purchased a plastic owl at our local hardware emporium. (It certainly got the dogs’ attention, as the thing has some piercing yellow eyes.) We’ll let you know if a $12 piece of airbrushed plastic can help keep your car free of bird poop.

We also had another weird uh-oh with the Civic. While raising the hood to check the oil, one of the windshield washer lines got caught on something; rather than simply coming undone, the line snapped the windshield squirter. And of course this was the driver’s side.

Yesterday we scored a good squirter at Speedway Pull and Save Auto Parts, our local you-pull-it. The price? Have a nice day, he said.

Central Florida Region posted the results from this past Sunday’s autocross here in Deland, we wound up 2nd on index out of 116 cars. Per felt like he lost a little bit of time in the turn around, essentially getting greedy and not late-apexing the sweeper enough to get a good run down the return straight. Kim had some cone trouble and had to stand on her first run. That’s racing!

4/17/05 Results

The ECU is located behind the center console on the "hump"

The JWT ECU was custom programmed to take into account 93 octane gas. Most JWT ECUs are programmed for California-grade 91 octane.

The underdrive pulley is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the heavy stock pulley.

With the pulley off, we replaced the crank seal which was leaking pretty badly.

Last night we installed the JWT ECU (programmed for 93 octane gas) and the GoFastBits underdrive pulley. The car feels quite a bit peppier and now revs to just about 8000 rpm without drama.

The SE-R will not be making the trip to the Mitty Autofest this upcoming weekend, Kim will be attending the Phase 1 class of the Evolution Performance driving school down in Ft. Pierce.