Kicking Off The 2025 Season!
The 2025 season has officially been kicked off and this year we bring the next evolution of our car to the Track Battle championship with GridLife. This year the main goal was to bring motorsports tools to the civic in the hopes of being able to level the playing field with some of the modern cars we're competing with. We've added paddle shifting to the car, along with motorsports ABS with the hope that this will make the car more consistent and easier to push at the limits.
The season opener for us at Carolina Motorsports Park was all about shaking down the Civic, dialing in the new setup, and seeing where we stacked up. Bringing so many changes to an event we knew we'd have our work cut out for us for the weekend and our assumptions definitely weren't wrong. We struggled with the braking system early, as well as some unexpected overheating issues that plagued us all weekend. We weren't able to run more than 1 attack lap which meant getting the car dialed in was near impossible.
We battled through and got the braking issues mostly sorted out with some things we knew we'd have to fix back at the shop, but we really weren't able to put any great laps together and we wound up finishing the event way down the finishing order. We expected to have some work to do but we expected to be further up the order and were quite disappointed with the results. We left the event with a list of things we needed to address, but there were some positives from the event. The paddle shifting worked really well, the aero updates we had done to the car in the off season seemed to work out nicely so we were hopeful that once we got our other issues figured out things would be good.
When the car got back to the shop we immediately tore into it, building a new coolant expansion tank system to help with cooling. Replacing the master cylinder to address our brake issues and also adding some bracing to the master to give better pedal feel. Once all the fixes were in place we loaded up and went testing at our local track. This allowed us to really dial in the car ahead of our next event at Road Atlanta. We turned almost 50 laps and the car worked flawlessly which was a huge improvement and a testament to the team we have working on this car. We got ready and loaded up for Road Atlanta.
Road Atlanta holds a special place in all our hearts. We've been coming to this track since 2015, but this is the first time we've been to Road Atlanta with GridLife since 2019 so everyone was really excited for this event. Right off the trailer the car was AMAZING with us breaking the TrackMod FWD record right in the 1st session and landing in 3rd place with some really stiff competition. As each session ticked by the car improved its time and we knew we really had something good for this event. The last session on day 1 I didn't manage to improve my time and we dropped down to 4th place, but we were still running lower power and we hadn't put our new tires on for the weekend. We knew this was good for us as that morning session on Saturday is where the magic laps happen. 
We bolted the sticker tires on, put our higher boost tune into the car and went over everything overnight to be sure we had all our ducks in a row before that morning session. We tucked the car away for the night and I mentally prepared for putting together a killer lap in the morning.
Unfortunately mother nature had other plans and it started raining overnight and it continued to rain the whole day on Saturday which meant we didn't get any more sessions for the day. I was kind of bummed about not being able to get that magic lap in, but I was also so happy with how good the car was all weekend. It was a dream to drive, I finally had my very own GT3 Civic and I know we're leaving this event with a great car and some tracks that I know we can deliver at. We left the event with the TrackMod FWD record which is also amazing.
We have a few weeks now before the GridLife MidWest Festival at Gingerman, we have a few things we're going to do to make the car even better and I'm excited to be back on track here in a few weeks. Thank you to everyone for all the support and we'll see you soon!
