You hardly hear anyone mention the Nissan Sentra when it comes to race cars. It’s the most docile car in stock form, perfect for an easy five-day work-to-home trip. But in Canada, the Sentra puts on some ‘big boy pants’ and aggressively hits the track for the Sentra Cup. Yuri of TheStraightpipes got the chance to sample this humble beast.
Canadians have a reputation for being the most humble people on earth. It could be the reason behind the Nissan Sentra as a preferable race car for the 2022 Nissan Sentra Cup Series.
The Nissan Sentra Cup series, initially the Micra Cup Series, is an exclusively Canadian racing event that involves taking a production car and turning it into a race car. The Nissan Micra (not available in the U.S.), also known as the Nissan March in Japan, is a vulnerable tiny hot hatch introduced to compete with the Honda City, Daihatsu Charade, Scion xB, and Echo.
The 2022 Nissan Sentra Cup Series race schedule has six events with two races each weekend. There will be two race weekends in Ontario and four in Quebec, including Round 2 at the Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada in Montreal. Sentra owners in Canada can watch the action for free.
There’s nothing much to talk about the stock 2022 Nissan Sentra when it comes to racing pedigree. It has a meager 2.0-liter 4-cylinder engine making 149 hp (151 ps) and 146 lb-ft (198 Nm) of torque.
The Race Sentra comes with the same engine and transmission you’d find in the stock variant, but with a few performance enhancements.
The competition model is available at Canadian dealerships and costs $32,032 (41,000 CAD), which is $17,188 more than the stock variant. With that, you get coilovers, brake calipers and rotors at the front, racing brake pads, front anti-roll bars, performance exhaust, 18-inch race wheels, MoTeC M1 ECM, cold-air intake, urethane engine and transmission mounts, Sentra SR spoiler, and a driver-controlled limiter for pits.
For safety and racing, the 2022 Sentra Cup car comes with an FIA spec six-point roll cage, an FIA race seat with a six-point restrain harness, an electrical fire suppression system, battery isolator, and front and rear tow hooks from straps.
Yuri didn't get to do the entire review in the Sentra Cup car. He got overwhelmed trying to drive it and dropped the ball. However, he still got to drive it a couple of times around the track.
“It didn’t feel overwhelming but was a bit slow. Brakes felt good, and turning was nice” Yuri confessed about driving the Sentra Cup Series car.
Humphrey is a car enthusiast whose love and passion for automobiles extended into collecting, writing, driving, and working on cars. He got his passion for cars from his Dad, who spent thousands of hours working on his old junky 1970 E20 Toyota Corolla. Years later, he would end up doing the same with a series of lemons he’s owned throughout his adult life. Full profile
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