The FK8s first track experience

Last weekend (September 11th/12th) I took the Civic Type R out for its first thrashing and let’s just say things did not go all that well. Not only did the heat make the car struggle with both coolant temps and brakes, but understeer literally ruined my weekend. More on all that stuff later.

Understeer, brakes, and engine temps were the three biggest issues I had and, in that order, as well. The event took place at my “home track” Spring Mountain Motorsports ranch in Pahrump Nevada. When I had originally signed up for the event the weather forecast said it was supposed to be in the high 80’s. However, it turned out to be a real scorcher. I’m not blaming the weatherman and I know that when you are looking at a weather forecast more than a month out it’s pretty much a guesstimation, but as the days got closer the forecast for the temperature just kept increasing. A few days prior to the event, the forecast was calling for Saturday to be in the high 90’s and Sunday to be 100!

It’s no secret that the Civic Type R struggles a lot with overheating and heat management, especially in conditions above 75 degrees. However, I was very excited to finally get the car out on track to put it though its paces and see how this car really does on track firsthand. It was also going to be a great opportunity for me to compare my times that I had gotten in my K20 EG vs the FK8. Unfortunately, on the day of the event they decided to change the configuration we would running. We were originally supposed to do the Mansell 3.4-mile config, but instead it was changed last minute to the Andretti 4.0-mile config.

If you have a Civic Type R and you go on the forums or FB pages, then you’ll know how much misinformation there is out there about our cars. Once person could say they took their car to the track and it didn’t overheat, and the next person could say they took their car to the same track, and it overheated immediately. There are too many variables when it comes to the performance of this car. Are they experienced fast drivers, or is it their first track day ever? Do they have modifications (and what do they have), is there car stock, what part of the country do they live in, what driving style do they have… There is so many things that go into it. For me, this event was going to be a great way for me to see what the limits of the car were in real time and with no bias. I was going to remember all the specifics just so I could report back to everyone and be as transparent as possible, so that anyone reading this will know how their Type R will react in track conditions.

Even though my first track experience with this car wasn’t the best, I’m still happy with it and there is so much potential for the car. Of course, with anything new and different there is some “getting used to” that needs to happen. Let’s face it, this car weighs ~1000lbs more than my previous cars I have tracked with and is overall much larger. This car has a lot of driving aids, much larger wheels, more power/torque, and a futuristic dual axis front suspension which is all completely new to me. So of course, there was going to be a steep learning curve for me, and I knew it, I just wasn’t prepared for how disappointing it was going to be.

I also want to apologize in advance for lack of interesting pictures and over all content from the weekend. Not only was I frustrated with my cars performance, but it was freaking hot out.

By now I’m sure you will see that the car is not anywhere close to stock anymore (as can be seen in the featured image at the top of this post). You can also see above that a lot has changed since the last post I did about this car.

Don’t worry, I have documented the installs of every part (and there is a lot) that I have put on this car over the last few months, and I do plan to do write ups for each category. For example, suspension, brakes, cooling, wheels tires… Be sure to keep an eye out for those as they start to roll out over the next few weeks, but for now I will give you a brief overview about everything I did to prepare the car for a track event. What went right, what went wrong, and what changes I will be making to the car before Buttonwillow on October 8th/9th/10th.

The only reason I haven’t posted in the last few weeks is because I have been so busy trying to source all these parts and get them installed on my car. I would have much rather posted each week what parts I had upgraded on the car, but it just didn’t work out that way with my work schedule and everything else going on in the world. Finding parts for this car (like many others) is next to impossible. I also had only a month technically to get all the parts ordered, delivered, installed, aligned, and street tested.

For me, the morning of September 11th started off just like any other track day adventure morning. I met up with Pat at 5:30am and then it’s about an hour drive to Pahrump from our side of town. This time was a little more special though. Not only was I taking out my very own Civic Type R to a track event, but I had a passenger along for the ride with me too. That’s right, Angie was coming along with me to share in the allure of tracking a true sports car. Normally, she doesn’t attend events with me, but this one was special and let’s face it… these things are boring except for the x4 30 minutes you are out on the track.

Around 6:45 am we arrived at Spring Mountain Motorsports ranch and started establishing our humble pit area. As usual, Scott, the third member of our track trio was fashionably late.

This event was also exciting for me because I finally signed up for the advanced group. Let’s be honest, this car on paper was substantially faster than my previous cars and I felt that it would be able to hold its own against other quick drivers. To be fair, I should have been signing up for advanced group for the last few events I had been doing there, but I always felt like the D16y8 and the B16a were always too slow. After all, this was Porsche club. The cheapest car there is my Civic Type R, and I didn’t want to be in people’s way.

I’m going to be honest here, I was really afraid of the cars ability to stay cool. From everything I had been reading online, it was apparent that a hood vent would be most effective in keeping the car cool. From day one with my car…

• I knew I was going to track it a bunch.
• I knew that a hood logically was the first “cooling modification” I should do. Before even heading out on the track, just to give my car even a standing chance, I knew I needed a hood. The one thing I didn’t know was, just how out of control I would spiral when it came to “prepping” my car for this event.

First things first, call up ICB motorsport and see if they have a First Molding hood in stock. Boom, they did! They happened to have the exact one I wanted, FRP with the carbon vents. I knew that I wanted to paint match the hood NH0 (championship white) and I thought that the carbon vents would look awesome unpainted. Ever and I jumped in his gladiator and drove down to Tempe AZ to pick up the hood. (I’m going to do a whole post of our adventure there, talk more about the hood, and plenty of pictures to go along with it)

After that one hood purchase, I could no longer contain myself. So once again, like all to often on the blog, I started to splurge on allll sorts of things. Which in hindsight as you read below, I’m glad I did!

• Parts list:
  • Brakes:
    • Raybestos ST43 front pads.
    • Project Mu Club racer rear.
    • Goodridge SS lines (updated bracket).
    • Castrol SRF fluid.
  • Wheels/Tires:
    • 18×9.5 +45 Regamaster EVOII in new almighty grey.
    • 265/35 Honkook R-S4.
    • Project Kics hub centric rings
    • Spoon sports chromo lug nuts
  • Cooling:
    • Koyo Radiator.
    • Acuity reverse flow hoses.
    • PTP inlet pipe blanket.
    • P2R inlet pipe thermal gasket.
    • Wrapped front pipe in DEI titanium wrap.
    • Applied DEI gold tape to oil pan where front pipe is near.
    • First Molding vented hood
    • Cut OEM 2020/21 grille
  • Suspension:
    • Swift Spec R springs.
    • SPC rear camber arms.
    • Removed front strut alignment pin for max negative camber.
    • Cusco front lower power brace.
    • Cusco Front strut bar.
    • Cusco 4 point center power brace.
    • Cusco rear crossmember power brace.
    • RV6 performance rear sway bar with spherical end links.
  • Extras:
    • Hasport 62a rear motor mount.
    • Radium catch can.
    • Spoon valve cover.
    • Spoon oil cap.
    • Spoon radiator cap.
    • Spoon sports clutch line.
    • Spoon drop in filter.
    • Acuity cable bushings.
    • AC Delco synchromesh friction modified trans fluid.

As you can see things really got out of hand but trust me it all stemmed from one thought process, prevention. Not to toot my own horn, but I’m above average quickness when it comes to lap times and I’m truly thrashing hard on the car when I’m on track. After consulting a few buddies about whether I should upgrade my brakes before heading to the track, the answer was unanimous, YES! The more I thought about it, the more it became apparent that the stock pads and fluid were not going to fair well with me behind the wheel.

Yes, there are some people who have taken their car out on track and done some blistering lap times in completely stock form. However, the thought of coming into turn one at 100mph, having my brakes pedal go to the floor, then crashing into the tire wall and totaling my brand-new car was one of the thoughts that kept coming up in my head. Therefore, I said, most of the modifications I did were for prevention. I wanted to prevent any sort of catastrophic failure from happening.

Regamasters… prevention! This car is heavier, faster, and had much larger wheels than any other civic I have owned. Sure, maybe you could get away with a flow formed wheel on those lighter, slower cars but on the Civic Type R I wasn’t going to chance cracking or breaking a wheel and then again, sliding off into the tire wall totaling my brand-new car. Sure, this is a stretch, but it was a chance I didn’t want to take.

Cooling upgrades, you’re god damn right that is prevention. Anything to keep the engine coolant temps down would help prolong engine life and prevent premature ware on the internals. I’m going to have this car forever, sure eventually ill need to get the engine rebuilt or a used one, but I’m trying to make it at least 10 years before that happens.

Chassis bracing. Just the thought of the chassis flexing and distorting because of enhanced grip that the car wasn’t designed for from the factory made me cringe. I’m not saying that if you don’t have these braces, you will ruin your car, I’m just telling you what goes through my mind.

Another great part about this car is it’s cargo room. just look at how much stuff I was able to cram in it.

Now for the down sides, and to be quite honest it was two things that I was not really anticipating.

UNDERSTEER was absolutely atrocious! The first session out I was instantly plagued with horrible amounts of understeer. Sure, when I came in after my session was over, I went to check my hot tire pressures and the front was at 41 psi! I had set the cold pressures to 29psi before heading out for the first session. This just proves how much stuff the front wheels are having to deal with on a FWD car. Overinflated tires can most definitely cause inadequate handling, and for sure this was a huge culprit of my understeering woes. I lowered the hot pressure to 35psi in front and kept it at 36 hot in the rear (in hopes to help induce more oversteer).

Now that tire PSI’s were set accordingly, hopeful, I went out for the second session. The results were pretty much the same and I was very disappointed. The car would run wide any time you would go near the throttle to power out of any turn. Not only was the understeer terrible, but I couldn’t induce any “lift of oversteer”. It was as if the car just had too much rear grip and the was causing the car to just plow.

I’m no suspension expert, but together with my buddies we can diagnose and dial in a car to the point that most would consider perfect. After finishing the second session and still having the same results as the first session even with reduced tire pressures, it was apparent that there was something bigger going on here than just tire pressures. The car wasn’t acting like any other car FWD I have driven on track before.

We had three options to explore when it came to fixing the understeering issue.

• Stiffening the rear sway bar:
  • When I installed the RV6 rear sway bar I had set it to the middle setting. This meant there was room to increase the rear sway bar stiffness. Increasing rear sway bar stiffness helps increase oversteer.
• Camber/alignment settings:
  • Since I was only able to get -1.5 degrees up front after removing the alignment pins on the top of the strut. This is where we were thinking a majority of the problem was.
  • The rear I had -2.4 camber and of course this wasn’t the ideal set up and probably helped the rear have so much more grip than the front. Having too much rear grip would make the car plow or understeer a lot.
• Chassis stiffness:
  • If there is not enough flex in the chassis or it is too stiff, this puts extra stress on the tires. Sure if the car had some super sticky slicks the tires would be able to cope with the added chassis stiffness. Hell, even if there had be more negative camber up front the tires could have probably handled the added chassis stiffness.

After day one was over, we drove home and that night I adjusted the rear sway bar to its stiffest setting. With no options to adjust the front camber any more negatively, adjusting the rear sway bar stiffness was the next best option.

The next morning on our drive back out to the track, I noticed that car felt nimbler which gave me hope. Increasing the rear sway bar stiffness can also act like increasing the rear spring rates too, and the stiffer rear spring rate will also help add more oversteer. It’s the same sort of theory as the chassis being too stiff and tires not being able to grip. The rear suspension doesn’t compress as easily, and it now takes more energy to compress the rear suspension and the threshold of grip on the tire is met before the energy can compress the rear. This is a very, very, rudimentary explanation and I hope it makes some sense.

First session day 2, cold tire pressures are set at 22PSI front and 25PSI rear. As I head out for my first lap the car does feel better, but as I start to get heat in the tires it becomes apparent that we have not solved the issue. With the first session over and my frustration at an all-time high, I removed the front strut bar. Hoping this would give the chassis some much needed flex so it could grab on to the asphalt and grip like I knew it could.

It was 10am and time to head out for the second session of the day. Tire pressures are set at 34PSI hot up front and 36PSI hot in the rear, rear sway bar is set on the stiffest setting, and the front strut bar has been removed. The car is noticeably better, much less understeer and you can feel the car grip and it throws you back in the seat as you accelerate out of turns. I ended up doing my best lap time this session coming in with a 3:12.739, this of course better than my times from the previous day of 3:15.384.

I honestly couldn’t believe how much better the car handled with out the front strut bar. Now I’m not saying that you shouldn’t run a front strut bar, but in my case, with the camber settings I was running and how hot the track temps were (120+ asphalt temps) removing the bar made a big difference.

I had wanted so much negative camber in the rear because I didn’t want to rub at all with the 265 tires and I thought that with Hondas awesome dual axis front suspension there would have been more grip up front than I could know what to do with. Obviously, with FWD chassis it’s usually a good idea to have more front camber than rear, but in my case that wasn’t possible since there was not really much adjustment in the front other than the stock slotted strut mounts.

Some people have recorded getting -1.9 front camber just by removing the guide pins. However, the front subframe alignment has a lot to do with how much camber can be achieved. For instance, my car had both front struts maxed out on the slots and the driver side only had -1.5 camber while the passenger side was able to have -2.3. We had to lessen the passenger side to -1.5 since we were maxed out on the driver’s side at -1.5. This is where the spoon rigid collars would be helpful because they would center the front subframe and allow for the camber settings to be more even (probably getting close to -1.8/.9 per side.)

The next major issue that I came across was… BROWNBO’s!

Yep, even after all of my brake upgrades the front brakes were still getting way too hot.

Hold on a sec… let me be clear, my brakes never stopped working, my pedal pressure was always consistent, and I never had an oh shit moment with the brakes. Despite getting so hot that the paint on the calipers was literally burning (turning yellow/brownish) the brakes always slowed me down no matter how late I braked.

The major “problem” is, I don’t think it’s good for the brakes to be getting that hot. Sure, maybe I need to a more aggressive pad but honestly, I think all that’s going to do is just create more heat. Maybe a more aggressive pad will have more bite and then in turn slow me down quicker, so I don’t have to have my foot on the brake pedal for so long. After all, the longer there is pedal pressure the longer there is friction, and the byproduct of friction is heat. I have read that this problem also occurs on EVO’s (we share the same caliper) and people that heavily track their EVO’s will get BROWNBO’s too.

Below you can even see how the red of the caliper isn’t as bright and vibrant as it was brand new.

Last issue was cooling and this one I was expecting so maybe I wasn’t as disappointed about it as the other issue’s I was having. To tell you the truth, I’m surprised the car was able to do as well as it did in the heat that was above 95 degrees. I never went into limp mode, yes, the car did run hot, slightly above the halfway point of the gauge and on my logR app it stated coolant temp was at 230-233 degrees F. Of course, this is not ideal coolant temps, and I would feel much better if the coolant temp was below 220 degrees. But all things considered, I was amazed that the car would take 20-minute secessions and not skip a beat. Even when the car would get hot, if I would just shift below 5k for a few turns (less than a third of a lap) the coolant temp would quickly recover to 195-200 F, then I was able to go hard for another lap or two until it would get back up to 230-233 F. This, I can only assume is because of the cooling modifications I had done to the car and that I was running with the heater on full blast.

The car would pull power, but that is mainly because the air intake temps were well above 120 degrees on track, and from what I have read once you start to get above 100 degrees F on intake air temps the car will start to boost less and pull timing. If you really think about it, no car can perform at 100% for extended periods of time with ambient air temps above 95 degrees. This was a proper torture test for it. If the car was going to survive this track day, then it could handle anything else I was going to throw at it.

Let me sum all that up for you. This chassis has already been proven to set blistering lap times and it seems that my alignment settings played a big role in having terrible understeer. I had all the ingredients for a great handling car, I just didn’t “bake it” correctly. As for brakes, if anyone tells you that they are tracking on stock pads/fluid and it is working fine for them, they are lying. If you’re really tracking your car, running at 10/10ths, and chasing tenths of seconds then the stock brakes are not sufficient. Sure, the stock brakes will work if you are in beginner group or doing auto cross, but not if you’re pushing hard in the car (like it was meant to do). Cooling is always going to be an issue on this chassis. The radiator, turbo, and downpipe are just too close to each other to allow for proper cooling. There are some big-name guys on the forums raving about C&R/PWR track radiators that eliminate overheating, but 1400 bucks for a radiator is way more than I’m willing to spend. Many have said that the Koyo radiator doesn’t do much in keeping the car from overheating. I took out my brand new 20/21 radiator (which has the upgraded fin design) and replaced it with a koyo radiator. The koyo radiator holds more fluid and is all aluminum. aluminum has much better cooling properties, it removes the plastic parts of the stock radiator that can be known to leak or crack under extreme conditions, and since it holds more fluid, it theoretically takes longer to get hot. All these things made sense to me, and I was able to save 1000 bucks by not getting the other brand. With the money I saved I was able to get a vented hood, which in my opinion is the best thing you can do to aid in heat management.

I also had to pick up a snazzy new helmet because mine expired last year.

Now I’ve got some great “bonus” information for anyone that is interested in a good experiment. Lets say we are doing a science project on “tracking the FK8”. We will use my car as the variable since it has been changed and we are trying to prove that I made it better. As luck would have it, at the event there was another 2021 Boost Blue Civic Type R. This one will be the constant for our experiment.

The Boost Blue Type R was all stock except for 18×9.5 +45 tires, 275 falken rt660 tires, Carbotech xp12 pads, and Castrol SRF fluid. This car is completely stock height, with absolutely no suspension mods other than pulling the front strut alignment pins to max out his negative camber in front.

This car and driver were able to do 3:09 laps while I was only able to PB with a 3:12. This car and I were both in the same run group and we were able to play some cat and mouse in our sessions. The results were, when I was in front, I couldn’t shake him, but when he was in front, he would take me to Gapplebees when coming out of any turn. This is because he was able to be on the gas much sooner than I was because he wasn’t experiencing the same understeering issues that I was.

It’s also worth noting that he had ZERO cooling mods. The only thing he did was remove the aluminum belly pan under the car. When I asked him about why he did that, he mentioned that he read the endurance guys with our chassis are doing that. His coolant temps were only slightly higher than mine, he would peak at around 237–240-degree F. Which isn’t bad considering that he spent NO money on cooling, and I spent over 2500 on cooling upgrades all for our cars to run a relatively the same temps. He never experienced limp mode either, and his one secret he had to keeping the car from going into limp mode was to shift at 6k or below. The one difference we noticed, is that it did appear my car could recover from being hot much quicker than his could. Keep in mind he was able to take me to Gapplebees while shifting at 6k or below, while I was over there bouncing it of the rev limiter because I couldn’t even hear my quiet ass car.

It was great to be able to compare to Civic Type R’s under the same conditions, at the same track, at the same exact time. The results really had me scratching my head. Oh, and he also had BROWNBO’s too. He even had titanium shims in in calipers too. Keep in mind that at 100 degree ambient temps there isn’t much heat being pulled away when the air is hitting the brakes.

We also both had our cars in R mode and held the VSA button for ten seconds. This method will almost completely disable the VSA, and you will be able to slide your car all around. If you only push the VSA button for 2 seconds or not at all, you will prematurely wear out your rear brake pads.

Take all this information as any way you want. I just thought it would be great to share it to be as transparent as possible for anyone that is interested in tracking their Civic Type R. It’s a great car, and is very capable… And we both tested them at temps well above what anyone will be tracking in and this track is at 2600 feet above sea level.

Like I said above. I still Love this car, and think it has great potential. I does appear that I botched the handling by not having the camber set correctly. I am confident that I will have that fixed before my next track day (I ordered EVS offset camber joints)

WOW! that was a lot to read about Civic Type R’s, hopefully you found that information helpful.

Now let me quickly recap the other that were there with me.

Starting off with Pat in the red S2000. This guy was having some bad luck a few weeks leading up to the event. It started with him getting a screw in one of his Hankook R-S4’s. His plan was to just kill those tires at this event, but unfortunately the screw in the road had other plans for him (the S2000 is his daily driver). He does have a second set of wheels and had just recently gotten some fresh new Falken RT660’s installed on them. However, he was saving those for the HTAC event at buttonwillow in October. Well now he was going to have to use the spare set of wheels with the RT660’s. When he was installing the spare set of wheels, he noticed a small hairline crack in the spoke. There is no way anyone should do a track day knowing they have a crack in their wheel, Pat’s only option was to order some new wheels. He ended up ordering some Vaikhari Hyper X 17×10 +50 and now had to get the new RT660’s switched over to two of the new wheels (he would just going to run two different styles of wheels, but both had the same specs) The Friday before the event, I went to his house to hang out while he was doing a once over on the car, changing the oil and checking all suspension links for play. As he started to remove the rear wheels (these were the older ones) he noticed that it too had some small hairline cracking in the spoke.

It’s now 8:00pm on the night before the event. Pat has the other two new wheels, but they are at his dad’s house, we also needed to get the tires swapped over too. At 8:00pm on Friday night 10 hours before we had to be at the track, we head out to find a 24-hour llantera shop that would be able to swap the tires for him. We drove north on Las Vegas BLVD to try and find one that was open but were unable to find one. Finally, we just went to the main one on Charleston and Commerce and were able to get his tires swapped over.