Front wheel drive cars like our beloved Honda Civics have a tendency to be very understeer biased from the factory.

Now what is understeer you ask?

From the driver perspective it would break down like this; You enter the corner too fast, rotate the steering wheel in the direction you intend to make your turn and despite all your best efforts the car does not go in the direction of the turn but rather much wider or simply straight ahead. Understeer or “push” as you may hear it referred to in the racing world is a condition when the front tires lose traction before the rear tires. When approaching a turn if we lose traction in the front tires the car will take a much wider radius to attempt to make the turn or in some severe cases just go straight and not turn at all.

Having already taken our 2018 Honda SI out on track right after we got it we confirmed what we already suspected; while it’s a great car out of the box the Civic still wants to understeer and could most certainly use some help in this department.

It was right after this first track day that we reached out to our friends over at Whiteline Performance to see if they could lend us a hand and activate some more grip for our ride.

After some emails and a phone call to discuss our goals and what we wanted out of the car, the guys over at Whiteline had just the solution we needed. They sent us over their full Swaybar set for the 10th gen Civic.

PART BREAKDOWN

Manufacture: Whiteline Performance

Part #: BHK017 (full kit)

Components: Front and rear sway bar, front and rear adjustable end-links, front and rear sway bar bushings

Specs:

• 27mm solid 2 point adjustable front swaybar and a 22mm solid 2 point adjustable rear swaybar.

• Stiffer poly urethane front and rear swaybar bushings

• Fully adjustable front and rear end links

Once we received the kit we had a very unique strategy that we opted to employ. Despite getting bars for both the front and rear we opted to only replace the rear bar first and see how the car performs. We did this to TACKLE the under steer problem specifically. when a car has understeer there are JUST a few things that one can do to mitigate IT. One of those things is putting a larger rear SWAYbar in the car To get the car to rotate more.

Immediately after the install (we put our bar on the stiffest setting) we noticed a dramatic improvement in the handling characteristics of the car. The SI wanted to rotate much more in corners and did so in a controllable manner. All in all it did a great job and as such we recommend an upgraded rear sway bar as a great bang for buck mod. We will roll on this set-up for a while and then decide if we wish to try out the front bar for our car.

27WON PRO TIP:

The rear end-links are a bit undersized for the hole that they go through on the bar. We find that if you over torque the end-link nut you can actually press into the bar a bit. When this happens you lose a flat surface to sit against and the endlink stud can move around a bit. The nut will work itself loose. We suggest putting an M10 washer on both sides of the bar to keep everything together. This will help make sure that you don’t find yourself chasing down a rear end clunk in the future.