Making a guest appearance in the Hankook Quebec Touring Car Championship, the Octane Motorsport MINI, the 2006 Ontario T2 Touring Car Champion had a full plate for our first races of the year in Québec.

A very deep field of 27 participants welcomed the Octane Motorsport MINI Cooper S JCW in the heart of St-Jovite at the historic Mont-Tremblant track for the final 2 races of the Québec championship.

Our first practice day was spent adapting the car to run on Hankook tires on a dry track. We weren’t 100% pleased with the set-up, but with the limited running time we have with these street tires, we found a compromise that we thought would showcase the fantastic handling capabilities of our MINI Cooper.

Saturday brought rain and we weren’t really sure what to expect for qualifying. We were ecstatic to qualify in 5th place which would put us in an advantageous position for the start of the race.

On and off rain showers made the tire selection somewhat challenging. We elected to start on full-thread tires. And the wild ride started for 20 minutes. The only thought that came to my mind was “This is crazier than the good-old days of the British Touring Car Championship. Cars 3-wide, all slipping and sliding and surprisingly, nobody touching each other.” With one of the front-runners stopping early in the pits, we were running 4th for much of the race, following the wildest of Acura Integra, whose driver should really consider switching to drifting. Lap after lap, the white car kept going through the turns with full opposite lock. We weren’t sure if we should follow closely, expecting him to crash or keep a distance to be on the safer side of things for when the crash would happen. And it did late in the race, bringing a full course yellow. We were up to third place.

At the restart, one of the championship leader and the little Orange MINI had a spirited battle and the BMW drove by us on the long straight, purely on power. We decided to keep our nose clean and let him go since we weren’t running for points and since we didn’t want to harm his championship chances.

We wish the race would have ended one lap sooner as during (what turned out to be) the last lap, we locked-up a wheel at the hairpin, a legacy of our lack of experience running the MINI without it’s fantastic factory ABS system (a series rule), sending us in a minor ballet of agricultural exploration, which relegated us to a 9th place finish.

Sunday is a day we would rather forget with our race ending with a flat tire as a competitor leaking a large quantity of fluids in front us, made us do a repeat of our agricultural ballet, but where the ground was not so even. The impact on the suspension was quite severe, puncturing the right front tire. We are still assessing the damage but it appears our strut tower also took some of the impact.

Special thanks to Satisfied Brakes for supplying us with amazing GranSport brake pads when we were in a bind.

Octane Motorsport’s list of sponsors and supporters include:

-MINI Original Parts
-M7 Tuning (M7tuning.com)
-Simone Performance Imports
-Castrol Canada (Wakefield)
-GranSport brake pads (Satisfied Brakes)
-Birchmount Collision
-Graphic Mart
-DuPont Automotive Finishes
-MINI Original Accessories
-H-Sport
-Vibrant Performance
-MINI Financial Services
-Wheel & Tire Zone
-Pneus Touchette
-Coopersport.ca

Octane Motorsport is a privately owned and funded racing team based in Montreal, Québec.

Photo courtesy of photospatrick.com

 

Do you have any idea what your lap times where at Tremblant?
Just curious, and I do realize it was in the rain.
Cheers

 

Great Job,. we ARE proud of you, wish I was driving with you

 

Thanks Phil!

You can always come across the border, all my American friends are welcome! Then again, may be I'm the one who should go visit... May be next year!

sempdog: Our fastest lap in the wet race was a 2:01 with street tires. I'll try to dig the other lap times.