It’s 2026 and the Civic is midway through it’s third season of autocross. I run in XB (mainly due to the engine swap) and have been enjoying competing locally even though I’m currently getting my butt handed to me by three boosted Miatas.

Besides needing more seat time to catch up to the Miatas my Civic is also in need of some fine tuning to dial in it’s handling and some mods for more power. The stock B20 has some good low end grunt but it’s no match for the higher horsepower cars and on the higher speed courses it’s leaving a lot of time on the table. With that said it’s been able to hold it’s own on the more technical courses and I’ve managed to get within 1 second of a boosted Del Sol on slicks which felt pretty dang good.

I’m working on some power mods but haven’t finished them yet so my main focus for the last few months has been on handling.

Spherical Compliance and Rear Trailing Arm Bushings

Back in 23’ when I first got the Civic back on the road I switched all the worn out OEM bushings to polyurethane. This was mostly a good decision but some of the more abused bushings have not aged well. The two most problematic bushings have been the front compliance bushings and the rear trailing arm bushings.

I didn’t want to just put another set of polyurethane bushings so I decided to step up to spherical bushings. The Civic only sees about 3,000 miles a year and no snow so I’m fairly confident they’ll hold up for my needs.

I ordered:

PCI front lower compliance spherical bushings (SB-DC2-FLC)
PCI rear trailing arm spherical bushings (SB-TA-HONDA)

The front compliance bushings were super easy to install. Normally you can swap them right on the car but I had my lower arms out for something else so I set them up on my bench.

I haven’t actually done the rear trailing arms because I’d have to get an alignment after and I’m procrastinating that.

Stiffer Springs

Since the Civic’s revival, it’s been running on 400 ft/lb front springs and 450 ft/lb rear springs. This was a good starting point but as I’ve gotten faster and added other supporting mods like a big rear sway bar I’ve found the car can get easily unsettled if I hit a bump during long sweeping curves.

My theory was that the rear springs weren’t stiff enough so during long turns they be fully compressed and if the car hit a bump or hole the spring was unable to absorb it and it’d jolt the chassis causing me to spin out.

I’m currently running Koni yellow shocks which are limited to 600 ft/lb springs before re-valving is required so I figured I’d start there. Hunting around on Ebay I was able to find a pair of NOS Eibach 600 ft/lb springs for $100 which was a bargain. After swapping out the rear springs I moved the old 450 ft/lb springs up front so the Civic is currently sitting on 450/600.

I’ve ran about 4 events on the new setup now and it’s made a noticeable improvement. The Civic feels more stable on sweepers and has less body roll during slaloms as well. I’m interested in going stiffer but since I’m limited by the Koni yellows I’ll probably play with some roll center correction next instead.

Steering Rack Rebuild

I’ve owned my Civic for 10 years and one of the few components I hadn’t touched was the steering rack. It was original to the car and still felt tight with no slop but it had been leaking for years and it was at the point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

The driver side boot was always wet and left some drips behind when parked but I had no idea how serious the leak was until I drained over 10oz of gross dirty fluid that was trapped in the boots. They were almost completely full and they’re suppose to be dry.

There was also a lot of gunk sitting in the bottom by the pinion. I think this built up because I ran the power rack looped for a few years and left one of the ports open so debris got in.

All of the metal bits were sandblasted and fresh paint. Those black caps were 3d printed out of TPU.

New seals, some new bolts, painted, and all re-assembled.

Looks good as new!

Notching The Front Upper Control Arms

Last fall when I increased the amount of front camber to -3.5 degrees the upper control arms started to hit the spindles when fully compressed.

The UCAs are Skunk2 Tuner series arms and overall work for my needs so I figured I’d make a small notch where they were hitting instead of swapping them.

I touched up the paint with red Rustoleum professional enamel. It’s a good enough match that you can barely tell.

This fixed the clearance issue and my upper control arms haven’t had any issues since.

Longer Wheel Studs And 6mm Spacers

I run 225/45/15 660s on 15x7+38 Kosei k1s and clearance is pretty good but the fronts were rubbing on the upper inner fenders when the suspension was compressed.

To address that I wanted to add 6mm spacers in the front but my wheel studs were still OEM length and too short so I picked up some ARP extended studs.

Extended vs OEM length.

The rears were super easy to install but the fronts were a PITA and my OEM hubs didn’t survive so I had to pick up a new set of dorman hubs. The aftermarket hubs have slightly larger holes in them that causes the ARP studs to spin so I added some tack welds to keep them secure.

The beefy tires and longer studs give the car a mild racer look.

Future Work

I’m about tapped on what I can do for the rest of this year but my future plans are: