Competition Clutch: Our Honest (NEGATIVE) Review
Hey guys, you know we spit the truth about all things Honda. We all know when upping the power on your ride, you need a reliable clutch that will hold.
Well, let's start with one that is not reliable. This COMP CLUTCH setup that we’ll talk about a bit below…We'll spill all the beans on why you want to avoid COMP Clutch in this blog. And if you are unlucky enough to have had this problem, maybe we can help each other!
We purchased a Stage 2 clutch, pressure plate and flywheel from Competition Clutch for our 2022 Si back in December of 2022. We've used Action clutches for the 10th Gen without issue but we decided to switch to the Competition brand in the hopes we’d get a less stiff clutch for our 2022 11th Gen. For convenience we’ll refer to this kit as ‘clutch’. It included a flywheel, clutch disc, pressure plate, and throw out bearing. We installed this clutch kit at 11,966 miles. Our Si was pretty well built out by this time (OE clutch slipping) and we needed more hold to fully test our GIN turbo.
Everything was fine until April 2024. There was no sign of a problem until we noticed some weird shifts and pedal shakes periodically. Maybe the throw-out bearing was failing? Shortly after this symptom the engine failed. We didn’t come to this realization for a while, after many painful diagnostics. It seemed too strange to us that the clutch would blow a motor and so we looked for any other explanation. Our next clue was CEL P0339 - Crankshaft Position Sensor. We did the normal troubleshooting and ended up finding our crank position sensor was damaged. That’s not supposed to happen! Inspecting the motor with a scope we found the trigger wheel had several bent and damaged teeth. The crankshaft had end play that it’s not supposed to. There was metal in the oil feed pickup for the turbo. Motor toast! That’s when we took the engine apart a bit and found the thrust bearing on the main journals was shot. Damn! We need a new engine. Our car's first engine lasted just over 16k miles. About 4k of that was with the COMP Clutch installed.
At that time, we really didn’t know why the engine failed. Bad engine build from Honda? Maybe this 11th Gen motor can’t handle the extra power as well as the 10th Gen? Unlucky? We wondered if the clutch was the issue but it seemed unlikely we were not sure how to verify that.
Sometimes we take our licks in this business and this seemed like one of those occasions.
So, we sourced a low mileage engine from another Civic with just under 25K miles to drop into our beloved Si. As it happens, it had a barely used Competition Clutch installed on it already. We were hesitant to put our (potentially faulty) original Comp clutch back on the replacement engine. So we didn’t.
Instead, we decided to clean up the Competition Clutch that came with motor #2 and install it along with a brand new OE throw-out bearing.
What are the chances that if our first engine failure was due to a faulty clutch that there would be another faulty Comp clutch floating around?
Well, at least in our case, the odds turned out to be pretty dang high!
We got about 50 miles on the replacement setup before we got oil pressure problems. After tons more painful and time consuming diagnostics we realized we had another blown motor on our hands. Yup! Bad thrust bearing and another blown motor.
OK. This one hurts. Two popped motors. Two clutch installs. Diagnostics. A full motor swap. A key test mule down for months while we sorted all this out. The costs were mounting. We bought another used engine, this time from a 2023 Acura with 19,000 miles. The third engine went in with a stock clutch with 16210 miles on our car so we could clear the air. At this time we were suspecting the clutch was the cause but we didn’t have concrete proof.
We reached out to Competition for help. This is a delicate issue. If they’ve been shipping faulty clutches then we give up evidence by returning both the clutches. So, we sent just one back to them. After about three months (imagine if your car was down this long), they verified it was defective. “We found that the pressure plate provided in the kit you returned was below our minimal requirements on plate load and parallelism.”
To us that means, you got a bad clutch/pressure plate. They proceeded to send us replacement parts.
We took them on their word and installed that brand new replacement Stage 2 clutch on the third motor for our 2022 Si in July of 2025 (17,368 miles). So far no problem after about 3,000 miles. The first one took a while to fail, so we can’t be sure we are all set, but we don’t expect any more problems.
That left us with the remaining, now likely defective, second unit. What to do with it?
So we reached back out to Competition Clutch. They stated their warranty policy and offered to replace the second unit if it were found to be defective even though it’s out of their warranty period now. How Generous! They refused to work with us in any manner to lessen the blow their defective product(s) had on biz!
Sending us a clutch kit after we’ve lost something like $15,000 and countless hours dealing with this seems like a slap in the face.
We’ve elected not to return the second defective unit to them. We’ll keep it as potential evidence. They are sticking to their policies. Big companies can usually get away with that. Their bet is that they can in this case too.
They may be right. Time will tell.
This blog was written for two reasons.
First to share with you what kind of company Competition Clutch (Wharton Automotive Group) is and to warn you to avoid their clutches, at least for the Civic. We would not buy a car or used engine with their clutch/flywheel assembly on it. It may be a ticking time bomb. We have no detail as to how widespread this quality problem they had is. One customer getting two bad clutches suggests it may be a widespread problem.
That brings us to the second reason for this problem. If you’ve experienced this problem then please reach out to us. Perhaps we can help each other out.
What clutch do you run? Have you had any problems with it?
Mod On!