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There's nothing like the anticipation that comes with a day at the track. Especially when you're there to learn how to race motorcycles.
Throwing a car around tight corners at high speeds is one thing; doing the same on only two wheels is quite another.
I was at the Shannonville track to learn techniques on motorcycle racing at the FAST riding school, which holds these course throughout the summer months. They are typically sold out months in advance during the summer season, so everyone at my session was keen to take to the track.
The day began with a lot of nervous laughter at the jokes that head instructor Michel Mercier kept cracking during the classroom session.
After several sessions riding around on the track applying the techniques we learned in the classroom, all 34 of us appeared to gain confidence in our abilities and the abilities of the sportbikes we were riding.
At least, right up until our last track session, in which one overenthusiastic student tried to pass coming out of the final corner and spun out instead. Lucky nothing was damaged except for his dignity.
After spending 8 hours in a full leather riding suit baking in the sun, it felt good to climb behind the wheel of the Accent and crank up the air conditioning to chill out for the ride home.
And after balancing precariously on two wheels at high speed, it felt good to once again have four wheels in contact with the ground.
Strangely, on the trip home, I really felt the buffeting of the wind streaming around the tractor trailers on the 401.
One thing I noticed right off when I got in the Accent (and think about every time I drive it) is the ashtray.
First, who really uses an ashtray any more? Smoking rates in Canada are the lowest they’ve been in something like 40 years – only 19 per cent of Canadians who are older than 15 admit to smoking these days.
As Allan Johnson pointed out earlier in this blog, Hyundai has obviously made choices to bring this Accent in at the price point it is-- shaving the frills where possible (let’s not mention the crank windows yet again).
And at $10,000, you’d figure a good chunk of the Accent’s potential buyers would be people just out of school looking for a good first car. That age group smokes even less.
So why would Hyundai spend money on a device less than 19 per cent of the population might use?
It's a handsome thing, to be sure.
When you first see it, you might mistake it for a mini travel coffee mug. It has a flip top and a cylinder shape and fit in a depression in the console just in front of the stickshift.
It has a fairly substantial, well-crafted feel to it, with its all-black, slightly rubberized surface.
But flip open the top, and you’ll see the cradle for your smoking butt.
It comes easily out of the indent where it sits and can be easily thrown away, for you non-smoking types.
Unfortunately, its resting place is not deep enough to hold another cup of coffee or water bottle (there are two official ones already in the front and two in a fold down arm in the back seat).
There’s a warning in the indent just in case you couldn’t figure out that it was too shallow to hold anything.
So you’re left with a small shallow depression suitable for holding a few coins (there are official coin slots elsewhere).
Or paper clips.
Or maybe the lids off your water bottle.
Any other ideas, let us know.
Today I noticed a split in the plastic flashing covering the sill on the passenger’s side of the Accent. It’s only about an inch long, but we should keep an eye on it to see if it grows any bigger.
It’s no big deal and if it were my car, I’d likely not even have noticed it. But when you write about cars, you notice -- and write about -- the small things.
On the plus side, when I got out of work in the late afternoon, it was 36 C with sweltering humidity.
I know the purists out there will pooh-pooh me for saying this, but that $1,000-plus we coughed up for the air conditioning was money well spent.
In less than five minutes at “Maximum A/C” the Accent was cooled enough that my shirt was no longer sticking to my back.
In stop-and-go traffic, there’s no way to get a breeze inside the cockpit of the car, so I had to resort to the A/C.
And I know using air conditioning adds to the filth in the air that makes the summers so sweltering and things would be so much purer and brighter if we’d all just turn off our air conditioning.
You first.
It’s the mundane tasks that really prove whether a car is suitable for your needs, because that’s what you’ll use it for over and over again.
If it falls short when you’re carrying the kids to and from school or daycare, who cares how comfortable it is on a cross-country run?
So today’s test was a typical weekly grocery shop for a family of four.
AZBA the Accent’s size certainly helped to manoeuvre around stray shopping carts and overeager shoppers rushing for that final parking spot.
And, in the end, it gets a qualified thumbs up on carrying the $170 worth of groceries from the store home.
Like a lot of people in the neighbourhood, we use green plastic bins to haul groceries, instead of adding to landfill clutter by getting more plastic shopping bags.
(What happens to those plastic bins should they ever break is another matter.)
Anyway, the hard sides of the bins meant they were less able to fit in the confined space of the Accent’s hatchback.
Out of the four bins, only three fit in the back, and that was a tight squeeze.
The fourth bin sat on the seat next to me. Putting a heavy bin on the back seat would have been safer 
in the case of an accident, but the lower back ain’t what it used to be and I gave the contortions necessary to shove it in there a pass.
Yeah, I know--so why not fold down the rear seats? Plenty of room that way for tonnes more Frosted Flakes and Kool-Aid Jammers.
Well, if you have two car seats, are you going to go to the effort of unhooking them, carrying them into your house and leaving them there while you get groceries? Then spend the time putting them back in the car?
And what do you do if you’re a sole parent trying shop with your kids in tow?
In short: there’s a reason why sedans are so popular.
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