Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

The Civic left with its new owner this past Friday. For those of you running STS in the Detroit area, watch out!

Today our Civic Si met some real competition: Scott Strickland’s nationally competitive ‘89 Civic Si.

Mike King was our official test driver for the comparo. He had high marks for our car.

The work on our Civic is more or less done—hopefully you have seen the recent installments in the magazine—but we still needed to gauge our performance. So, was the car a real STS contender?

To find out, we held a little face-off today. The benchmark was Scott Strickland’s ‘89 Civic Si, the car that recently took the STS and STX class wins at the SCCA’s Dixie National Tour. Its driver, Mike King, was our official pilot. (Mike drove this car to a third place at last year’s Tire Rack SCCA National Championships, by the way.)

To keep things fair, the same set of tires were used on both cars. We just kept swapping them back and forth.

How did our car do? Well, let’s say we were very pleasantly surprised. Look for all of the numbers in GRM very soon.

After installing the new rear brakes, the pedal felt a little soft. We re-bled all four corners today, and the pedal feels better.

New rear calipers and pads should make our Civic much happier.

Good thing we checked the “good” side, too. We were missing one of bolts that goes into the slider pins. A new hardware kit solved that problem.

While bleeding brakes today, we noticed a screw in one our BFG street tires. We used to run these Rota Circuit 8 wheels on the Miata—they look pretty tough on the Civic. We’ll get the usual wheels back on the Civic soon.

A little more than a week ago, something just didn’t feel right with the Civic. It felt like something was dragging—not really bad, just enough to be felt. The car had sat through a big rain, so all of the rotors were rusty. We decided to keep an eye on things.

A day or so later (basically about five miles later), the car didn’t feel any better. There was still some rust on the outside of the left-rear brake rotor, so that’s where we started to look.

We jacked up the car on Saturday and gave that wheel a spin. Yeah, something was dragging. Pulled the pads on that side and noticed that the piston’s O-ring was torn. The pads were worn at a funny angle, too.

We decided to replace the rear calipers. One store in town had rebuilt calipers in stock, so we grabbed one. No one had decent pads, but we had an extra set of new pads leftover from another Civic—fortunately the 2000 Civic Si shares pads with this car.

Went to attach the brake line to the left-rear caliper, and something wasn’t right. Upon further investigation, looked like the threads on our new caliper were buggered-up.

That was the only left-side caliper they had on hand, so we had to wait until Wednesday to get another one. Got the new caliper, and it went on the car with no drama.

When we started the job on the right side of the car, however, there was a little drama: One of the bolts that goes into one of the slider pins was missing (!!!!!!!). We picked up a new hardware kit, and in theory everything will be back together tomorrow. (We stopped for dinner.)

Quick update: The car now has two new rear calipers and the system is bled. We found a screw in one of the tires, so the car is now on some different wheels.

The other night, we used the Civic to run the puppies to the pet store. A little while after returning home, we noticed that the Civic’s taillights were on. Weird. Turns out the brake lights were on. And didn’t want to go off.

The answer was found on the floor mat: The crumbled blue remains of the pedal stop. It looked like someone had crushed up a blue crayon.

This isn’t the first pedal stop to disintegrate on us, so we’ll grab a few extras when we visit the Honda dealer. (For now, the brake light fuse has been pulled, and the car is parked.)

In autocross news, we ran the car this past weekend with the Central Florida SCCA. Since the last few autocrosses have been wet-weather affairs, we tried a different strategy: Run suitable tires.

We ran on our daily-driver BFGoodrich g-Force KDW tires and prayed for rain. Well, despite a favorable weather report, the skies were blue all day. On the plus side, the BFGs were strong under braking. They did get a little greasy, however. We finished third out of four that day—not great, but still fun.

See how sunny it is? That totally changed about 90 minutes after this photo was taken. Thank you Jason Stroud for the photo.

Well, this past Sunday’s event started out nicely—sunny skies and lots of autocrossers. We ran the Civic with the Martin Sports Car Club, and they let us run the STS class that day. Two Civics would be in the class: ours and Super Dave’s.

It looked like a fun course, and we may have had the lead after the first two runs. That’s about when the rain started falling. And it never really let up. The rain wasn’t so bad, but the lightning caused officials to call in the workers. We’d come in, the weather would let up, we’d go back out to work, and then it would all start up again. Eventually, those in charge canceled the event. Bummer. The ride home actually wasn’t that bad….

We watch some people get so wrapped up in the competition that they forget to have fun at an autocross. This weekend was definitely fun, as we again got to run against Super Dave at a local SCCA event in nearby DeLand, Fla. Our editor started the competition with the faster time–by about a second–but then Dave made it equal. With rain starting to fall, Dave then pulled out an awesome run and took home first-place points. Yeah, he got us, but so what, we had fun. Once the cats and dogs started falling, we both high-tailed it out of there.

On a different note, we just placed an order with Majestic Honda for some needed bits: assorted seals and gaskets, fresh cap and rotor and the parts needed to fix the rear hatch struts.

This past Sunday was our last event at Indian River Community College. Always a bummer to lose a site. We had a small turnout with only 54 drivers total, three of which were in our Street Touring S class. Going in, we figured we’d shoot for a top-three finish. After spending all day under threatening skies, the rain started to fall during our first run. In the end, we finished second in class. On the way home, we learned a valuable lesson: shaved Falken Azenis tires are not so great in the rain.

Believe it or not, but there were a few ‘69 Camaros at the Hot Rod Power Tour.

We followed the tour out of town for a bit. We caused a pretty neat traffic jam. Not sure if the locals were as thrilled

The Civic spent last Sunday in Sanford, Fla., attending a stop on the Hot Rod Power Tour. Each year, Hot Rod Magazine organizes a long-distance haul for their readers, with this year’s trip starting in nearby Orlando.

On Sunday, the tour visited Sanford for a stop at SuperChip’s facility. The grub and eye candy were both free. We’re told that each stop on the tour attracts about 1300 cars.

This Sunday we’ll be autocrossing the Civic with our local SCCA region. Unfortunately, looks like we have lost one of our sites. Bummer.

This weekend’s co-driver, Super Dave. It was super-hot this weekend in DeLand, Fla., and Dave is showing how keeping cool, hydrated and shaded are important. While his ‘99 Civic Si makes more power than our car, he said our car felt much better through the slaloms—much less body roll.

It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. Our friend and usual competition, Super Dave, asked if he could co-drive our Civic at this weekend’s event. His car was having a few issues, so he asked if we wouldn’t mind sharing. And in return, well, in return Dave’s company is well worth it.

Thanks to the small run groups, the two-driver teams were kept plenty busy as there was barely enough time to swap numbers and get drivers in and out of the car before being called to staging again. Check the tire pressures? No way, as there was zero time to do anything about it.

We started the day with 36 psi up front and 34 psi out back and ran the car like that. It felt great through the slaloms. The car developed a push as the session went on, but that’s probably thanks to the mid-90-degree temps and the fact the tires were given no time to rest. Plus Dave’s sprayer died on us.

In the end, the crew bagged first and second place. Not a bad way to spend a sunny Sunday.

Official results can be found here: results