Civic Type R Motor Swapped Honda Civic SI

This is Kevin Boehm’s 2017 Honda Civic Si… with a Type R CTR swap. Yes I know what you’re thinking. Why in the HELL would you buy a new Civic and immediately swap it with a different engine out of the same chassis? Why not just buy the Type R from the beginning? I had the same thought initially. But for Kevin, it’s not just about the car. It’s about the passion! In the Honda world, motor swaps are at the core of the game. And Kevin found his situation as the perfect opportunity to give Honda’s new technology a test.

Honda performance Development

He acquired the CTR engine from Honda Performance Development, as it was actually a leftover from their Formula 3 open wheel race car program! He then purchased the bare white-body chassis from HPD, and convinced them to let him part out two different partial cars and swap over to his white-body.

As far as the swap goes, it was actually easier than he thought! Honda designed the 10th generation Civic with a lot of commonality between the different cars. In doing so, the OEM Type R engine-mounts allowed the CTR to be mounted directly up to the Si chassis! Kevin is still running the Si suspension, however, only causing an issue with his axles due to the fact they needed to be shorter! To combat this, he took a few measurements, and sent them off to Driveshaft Shop for some custom axles that use the Type R inboard joint and the Si outboard joint.

The biggest issue Kevin ran into with the swap, was getting all the electronics to communicate properly. Because of this, he decided to run a stand-alone ECU, versus the factory ECU from the CTR.

Honda’s Back

Overall, the new Civic platform is DEFINITELY a force to be reckoned – with or withOUT some fancy swap left over from an open wheel race car. There’s no denying that Honda’s back in this thing! Just ask any Ford ST owner & watch him start to squirm a little. An Si might not be the quickest out of the box, but it’s set up for endurance. The 10th generation Si/CTR has less understeer than any other factory Civic platform, making it that much easier to rail around corners and give it the sauce. It’s proving itself to be a real competitive contender amongst the other performance 4-cylinders out there. And I’m personally looking forward to seeing how far these Honda boys keep pushing this thing.