The 2014 calendar year will be over in a few hours so I thought I would take some time to reflect upon the past year as well as give some information about what we have planned for 2015. This past year has been another year of growth for Touge Tuning and we hope to continue this into 2015. We focused a lot of attention on expanding and improving our motor build program as we’ve had a strong demand for this from all of you. We made some big steps this year with the program and we will continue to work on this as new technology and products become available. An additional hoist was added to the shop area to give us more flexibility with working on long term and same day appointments. We also spent a significant amount of time at the track and supporting our clients at Time Attack events. A big thank you goes out to those who chose us to build, maintain and offer support at the track this year. One of those clients, known to most as “Project Blackout”, ended up taking home the street class AWD championship at the CSCS Time Attack Series here in Ontario. It was extremely gratifying to not only help the owner get his first taste of track driving this year but to help him develop himself and the car over the season to continually go faster. We look forward to 2015 where we expect to have an even larger group of competitors racing under the Touge Tuning banner. One of the highlights of the year was being asked by C360R (Compass 360 Racing) to provide technical support in developing their Subaru STi Race Cars for competition in Pirelli World Challenge and the Continental Sports Car Challenge. It was a great experience for us as a small business to work with such a professional and dedicated group. The cars became extremely competitive towards the end of the season and managed a few podiums throughout the year proving that the AWD Subaru is ready to win! We think 2015 will be a great year for the cars, team and drivers, the change to Audi S3 cars for the ST class means they will be the only team running AWD cars in both classes of CTSCC next year.
On the other side of things we have added a bunch of new brands and products to our offerings. We’re always excited to offer new products but we are very selective on the brands and products we offer. If we wouldn’t use the products on our own cars then they won’t be sold by us. Some of the great new brands you may not know we started selling include Extreme Turbo Systems, Radium Engineering, JRZ Suspension, Girodisc, Roger Clark Motorsports, Vi-Pec/LINK. Over the next months we will be working diligently to get these products/brands live on our website for purchase. Speaking of our website, we unfortunately suffered a bit of a set-back late in the year with a forced PHP update done by our hosting provider. The update is meant to fix many things but due to the age of our current web-store it made many portions only partially functional. As soon as this occurred we began development of a brand new website which we’re hoping to launch in the next 1-2 weeks. The new website will provide a new refreshed look, better navigation, new functionality and much more. We’re very excited to get it live but we want to make sure everything is working great before we do.
This year we put on a couple open houses at the shop and thanks to a few helpers they turned out to be a huge success. Unfortunately due to their popularity the minimal parking areas that we have available quickly became overwhelmed. Due to this we have decided that in 2015 we will be hosting a few of these events but they will be on a smaller scale. We will likely do it in the form of an open house/dyno day alongside our good friends at OnPoint Dyno. We also were able to attend the Toronto Subaru Club Hypermeet for what I believe is the 5th year in a row, longer possibly. This year we were set-up with OnPoint Dyno and it is always great to meet those of you that may not be able to make it to our shop in person. A lot of money was raised at the event for The Ronald McDonald House which is awesome, hopefully 2015 can break the record we set for 2014 on funds raised!
2015 is going to be a big year for us with a lot of plans in motion. We just picked up a new 2015 Subaru WRX that we will be using to do some testing on the dyno and at the track to give an idea of what mods can really make a difference. Our shop unlimited class time attack car should finally be ready for it’s first laps in the spring time, this is exciting but at the same time the car still has a long way to go since we will be relying on a fairly stock engine set-up while the chassis and suspension is developed.
We hope everyone has a safe and fun New Years Eve and we look forward to assisting each and every one of you in the future!
Sincerely,
The Touge Tuning Team
