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You may have seen it before – a clutch that comes in a case that looks like it might very well hold the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal. That’s one of Mantic Clutch’s [2] trademark touches, and like everything else they do, it’s like that for a reason. Based in Australia, Mantic is a division of Clutch Industries, which has been in business since 1951 and has supplied OE clutches to the likes of Ford, General Motors, Datsun, Toyota, and Mitsubishi.
[3]The Mantic line came about when CI realized that the business of supplying to manufacturers was in an economic squeeze – while the OEM’s were looking to cut costs and move to offshore suppliers, Clutch Industries decided that they would be well-served by creating a line of premium clutches for enthusiast and racing applications, where quality, performance, and value-for-money were top priority.
Today, Mantic is the only company in the Southern Hemisphere with a clutch dyno to provide actual, tested torque ratings instead of calculated estimates, and they have four full time engineers devoted exclusively to clutch design. Their first Holden test car, nicknamed “Rick,” had the bellhousing removed and replaced so often while testing clutches that they actually had to helicoil the block when the threads wore out. And their clutches have gone four years without a failure in the punishing Australian V8 Ute racing series.
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So what does all that have to do with those bad-ass travel cases, you might ask? Well, when Mantic discovered that conventional packaging wasn’t enduring the trip half-way round the world very well, leading to damaged parts and disappointed customers, they went all-in and switched to the bomb-proof road cases you see here. That devotion to getting it right has earned them runner-up in the “best packaging” category at the 2013 SEMA show, which leads us to wonder what kind of solid-gold-billet boxes beat them out for first place!