Vibiant

The parking lot was perfect; a thick crust of wet snow on ice, about an inch thick.  Enough to show tire tracks.  Walking behind my car, I see two pairs of tracks, one set smooth, perfect part circumference, and a second set.  This set describes almost half a square, straight then an almost perfect right angle, then straight again to merge with the curve.  Like I said, almost perfect.

The modern car is loaded with no shortage of safety features, not all of which help the proactive driver.  The proactive driver uses all of the controls of the car to control it, including, as in this case, the handbrake.  The handbrake turn is the cure for the common understeer, maintain momentum, press the handbrake button and hold it down, give the lever a judicious yank, and feel the car slew sideways with your inner ear.  Compensate, but don’t overcompensate, to aim the car, as if you were aiming a gun, and roll into the throttle to proceed in the new direction that you have chosen.

My main concern with this Fit of mine, being the first car that I’ve own that had ABS, was whether the ABS would default to “ice mode” when I pull the handbrake?  Ice mode essentially means no brakes at all, your diligent car waiting for the wheels to resume turning, i.e., the return of traction, before it even attempts to apply the brakes again.  The locked rear wheels of the handbrake turn is what makes it work, but if it removes the ability to stop the car, that moots the technique for anything but sliding into a parking spot that you were barely molving into anyway.  In addition to scaring girlfriends and goofing off, judicious use of the handbrake on snow and ice when in cornering situations on dry pavement lift throttle ovesteer would be more than sufficient is sometimes necessary.  The Fit, by the way, barely lift throttle oversteers under the best of circumstances, so at the speeds that you can attain in winter, all you’ll do is plow, unless you use your right hand.

It take practice.  I practice every year, first snow of the year, in the largest, emptiest parking lot thta I can find.  Groping for the subtle shifts in C of G changes  is a frangible skill, practice builds it up.  So I found an especially empty lot this year, and drove in a wide circle, slowling adding speed until the car started to veer wide, I stepped on the brakes hard enough to engage the ABS, and then grabbed the other brake.  To its credit, the Fit knew what to do; the ABS pulsed, I still had control of the steering, the rear wheels locked, and I tightened my turn radius, easy as pie.  Or, easy as doing it six or eight times in a row and then getting the feel for it.

So, no worries, right?  If you hold the handbrake too long, the car beeps at you, so it can sense you”re doing something that it doesn’t approve of.  Then the ABS light went on one cold, cold morning,  and it took much of the day before the ABS modulator came back on-line, so it won’t be until I get the ECU read before I know exactly what happened, and what, if anything, was the cause of it.  But no problems since.  And I am still making the circle and the square.

OK dammit, it’s been long enough, the Fit is here, the Fit is fully broken in, and I’ve done enough laps around Ohio now to have some sense of what it is actually trying to accomplish while I’m driving it. 

 First, some particulars on me.  I don’t race, I stopped street racing years ago, and most of the time i am usually trying to eke out maximum MPG to really piss off those fools who shell out thousands more on hybrids and can’t match the mileage numbers I get with my otherwise ordinary car.  [I get between 39-43 MPG in mixed city/highway, by the way.  EPA est. for the Fit is 31/38 city/highway.]  But at the same time I do enjoy finding the apex, and driving in a spirited fashion.  G forces are fun. 

 Now, we can’t go for a drive unless the car is prepped properly.  Mechanically, the car is still completely stock, right down to the 175/65-14 all season Dunlops.  They are quiet, and ride pretty well, but I keep looking at Tire Rack ads for acceptable plus zero sizes.  Stock pressures are 32 psi front and rear, but mex. press. on the tires themselves is a healthy 44 psi, so for the moment anyway, I’ve set the pressure at 40 psi front and rear.  Impact harshness is up, obviously, but shoulder wear is down during hard cornering.   There are a number of 270 degree, constant radius entrance ramps to I-90 in my area, I would estimate the radius to be about 300 feet.  They are posted at 35 MPH, and going 45 MPH through them at stock tire pressures means moderate understeer and scuffing on the front tires  a little more than an inch up the sidewall.  40 psi. doesn’t change the understeer, but does preserve the sidewalls.  I carry about .75 pounds of stuff in the glove box and front storage cubby, a couple CD’s , a flashlight, papers, and about 24 pounds of trunk stuff, tire pump, 2 gallons of windshield washer, jumper cables, etc.  Yes yes, but this is my daily driver, and experience has shown that nothing tempts Murphy’s Law more to give you a flat than to run without a spare or jack.  Leaving the spare out of my 1979 CHevy Impala did help, but the three flats I had in three years made the proposition less attractive. 

 Originally, my cheif concern had been the elctric power steering, I was a little concerned that the weighting would feel artificial.  If the car is stopped, very slight movements of the wheel will first take up the slack, admittedly, this steering system has very little slack, and then you feel the tourque from the electric boost motor kick in.  While moving though, the effect is transparent.  The wheel weighting is a little on the heavy side, the steering on my SE-R was lighter, 2nd gen RX-7’s are quite a bit lighter, but the motion feels fluid and low-friction.  The steering ratio is fast, almost Z51 Corvette fast.  The car feels stable at speed, even high speeds, [long, flat, open sections of Northern Michigan at say, 95, felt quite stable] and you can still get lots of wheel angle with little turning., my hands rarely leave 3 and 9 [thumbs on the spokes] in normal maneuvers.  The throttle is light and needs some finess, I kept noticing at first that the revs would zing up almost a grand during every upshift.  Apparently, my right foot was trying to take up gas pedal slack that wasn’t there, or I wasn’t letting off the gas as much as the car would like.  My technique doesn’t feel any different now, but I have stopped doing that.  The flywheel doesn’t feel specifically heavy, but it does hang onto revs, though in truth no more than other moderns cars.  One big surprise was the lack of engine braking.  I’ve never driven a 2-stroke Saab, so I can’t say that it freewheels quite that much, but I’m used to small cars with high compression engines and short gearing, which usually works out to a big fat jolt of engine braking.  The Fit gently coasts down to idle, almost like it had an automatic.  According to the Helm manual, the ECU shuts off the fuel injectors on overrun as a fuel saving strategy, so that may be the culprit.  The brakes are strong, the EBD seems to make up for stomping on the brakes, it is very difficult to get the ABS to engage if all four wheels are on dry pavement.  Get any one of them airborne, and it a different story.   I haven’t managed to corner hard enough to tricycle and trail brake at the same time, but given what the car does over bigger pavement lumps while braking suggests to me that it will go into “ice mode” in those conditions, which will make the braking very poor in those circumstances.  Bear that in mind.

 Since the car is front drive, 64% of the weight up front, and no rear sway bar, it car will understeer, that’s just a fact of life.  On constant-radius turns, the understeer is mild, but present.  Decreasing-radius turns can be tricky, you have to be very concious of weight transfe,.  It is all too easy to pile too much weight onto the outside front tire, which leads to massive understeer and yoyu just plow right off your intended line in a perfect tangent.  I dove for a left turn lane with too much steering angle and too much decelleration and totally missed the lane I was aiming at.  It was like I was driving in snow. 

 Lift throttle oversteer does not seem to be a problem, you can take that any way you want to.  A previous Hyundai Accent I had was quite sensitive to it, which made the car highly maneuverable, but uncomfortably twitchy, almost to the point of driving it like a rear-engined Porsche; brake only in a straight line, and accelerate through corners.  In that car, you could quite clearly feel the dynamic center of gravity move back anf forth throughout the length of the car, depending on what you were doing.  THe Fit is far less sensitive to it, which is great, most of the time, but a little tail-happiness wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, from time to time.  The Progress Group supposedly had a rear sway bar available now, I’ll have to check that out. 

This would be OK if I lived in Lake Forest, Illinois, because if I lived in Lake Forest, I would be used to this sort of thing.  It was also mean that I was filthy rich, flat towed a Porshe 928 behind my Prevost coach for use as a dinghy, and 5 months after my trip to Maranello, my Scag would be showing up on the transporter. 

However, I live Someplace Else, I do not own a Scag, Prevost or even a crummy 928 I can flat tow behind things, but I did order a Honda Fit.  A Fit that might actually show up sometime soon.  I think.  Maybe.  I have a window of dates sometime in March that it may appear, like some kind of last-minute Celine Dion concert for the President, but since it has been five months already, I have sloped down to grim resignation that at some point, like the Bataan Deat6h Marchm, it will be over. 

I am automotively aware in ways that most people could only hope to be aware of their spouses.  This might perhaps explain why I have no spouse, but we’ll leavbe that for a different installment under a different category.  When the Fit came out in 2003, in Japan, and in Europe labelled as the Jazz, I was taken by the size; smaller than the mutating Civic but not actually K-class.  Since I’ve already owned a K-class car, [a 1971 Honda AX600], I knew that I at least stood a chance of fitting in a Fit, and there was a small possibility that they might axctually import it here.  It looked like a fun car by dint of being small, and hence, light, and the British auto press loved it, and generally speaking their car dynamics priorities are in line with mine.  Small and nuiimble rule the day, even without huge horsepower.  Yes, I would buy an Elise if I could afford one, and drive it every day. 

Next, the waiting game; I had heard rumors of the Fit coming Stateside, and waited, I needed another car, the Rust Fairy had spanked me good on my SE-R ,to the point where the radiator was in danger of actually falling out of the car, so another vehicle was in order. , not that I want to get rid of my SE-R, but I am simply running out of car to love; little bits of it keep falling off.  I was at one point almost prepared to buy a Chevy Aveo, simply because it was roughly the same size and shape as the Fit.  Not to offend friends of mine who own them [and for some reason there are several], but the Aveo is to a Fit as an inflatable fuck toy is to Kate Beckinsale; it offers roughly the same features but the experience is totally different.  But I have to admit there was a several month period where I was ruthlessly combing back issues of Car to try and find some a d find any articles at all about the Daewoo Kalos, which is what the Aveo actually is, though even overseas the Daewoo name has evaporated and they’re all Chevys now. 

Nevermind.  Fast forward a year or two, and the Fit comes to America, as does the Versa, the Yaris, the new Rio and Accent, so I test drive them, all except the Fit, which is in such great demand [apparently, I wasn't the only one buying Tamiya Fit kits and hoping] that test drives were essentially impossible. Car and Driver really liked it, found the handleling excellent, and generally gushed about it.  Of the rivals, the Yaris came pressy close, but the center-mounted instruments anny me to death, to the point where I would have to set aside money to immediately buy a compact Stack dash to place infront of me, and include a tach, which for some reason is nonexistent on the Yaris Hatch.  The early Previas had no tach, either, the reason from Toyota being that Previa buyers were mostly women and that women were confused by tachometers.  Yup, that’s what they said. 

So, I was set on the Fit.  I ordered one.  Put my deposit down and waited, since they were saying in November, when I was doing this, that the wait would be until February,, maybe end of January, depending on demand.  they’re all made in Japan, one of the few Hondas that actually are, and bought every magazine I could find that had any Fit coverage at all.  I called i

I called in mid December.  They told me to not even bother for a while, the car wasn’t built yet.  I waited.

 I called in mid-January, and was told the same thing.  I bought more magazines.  They sell the Fit in 70 countries or so, and demand is high.  And, since this is a hip car meant for hip people [just look at the broschure if you don't believe me] they have fallen under the spell of the Madison Avenure myth that there are only hip people, buyin’ their lamas, and watching , drive in movies, they only live on the coasts, not the Mdwest, so the Fit supply is even tighter here.  this was the point wherre I was told that I shouldn’t expect my car until March. 

 I called in mid Feb, and discovered one truism of the automotive buying experience:  You know you’ve been waiting a long time for your ordered car when the salesman youy placed the order with no longer works at the dealership.  Long waits are not especially unusual, in the high-end sprts car world, you kind of expect to wait for your Ferrari.  The Fit is many things, but it is no Ferrari.

Once I diid finally find someone to talk to, I did discover that my car had finally been buit.  Some time during the week of February 15th.  It was getting there, or getting here.  Checking the internet told me that a 14 to 19 day transit time across the Pacific is typical, then there’s Customs, the various important Homeland Security kinks, then rail trransit across the country to Chicago, Honda’s main distributuion point, then by truck to here, which this past Friday means some point between March 16th and March 20th.  Finally!

 At some point this category will be filled with interesing Fit-ness, once I actually have the car.