Due to some minor coolant issues with the (formerly) trusty EF Civic, I resorted to CR-X Plan B for the weekend’s event:  Bryant Park hill climb with the good people at Nugnats and EXE.  Though the CR-X isn’t the ideal car for twisty hill climbs, refusing track time is not what I’m about.  So I threw everything out of the back of the Civic into the CR-X, put my earplugs in and hit the road.

Bryant Park features a bunch of elevation change as you’d expect, and most corners are terrifying to some degree.  When I was last here I put my old Nissan Micra on its roof, so turning up in a car with 5 times the power and shiny paint was exciting!

I expected the CR-X to be a bit of a handful on the tight Bryant Park layout.  Disappointed I was not.  Here’s a video of my best time on the figure 8 layout:

[nz_youtube id=”0lTi2rnY1K4″ width=”” /]

There’s plenty of mistakes, miss-shifts, wild steering work and some time spent on 2 wheels in there.  Also despite having multiple runs on each course, I forgot which way I was going often.

The result for the day was 3rd fastest on both courses; 66.35 on the Figure 8 and 59.98 on the clockwise layout.  A long way off the potential of the car, so I look forward to heading back to see if I can better those times.

Thanks to Noisyninja for the pictures, and the interminable banter,  EXE Crew and Nugnats for putting on the event, and all the participants for showing up and making it a great day.

– Tom

CR-X and Civic: Winton track testing
CR-X: Vic Time Attack at Phillip Island GP