AMERICAN TOUGE 3

AT3 VIDEO SHOOT

Spectators are welcome to come see the video shoot.

  • Where : willowsprings International Speedway
  • Course : Horse Thief Mile
  • When : December 20th(Wed), 2006
  • TOUGE Drivers : KEIICHI TSUCHIYA & YASUYUKI KAZAMA
  • TOUGE Gals : KAZUMI KONDO & BOBBI BILLARD

AMERICAN TOUGE 3

In 2006 the series continues. AT3 is an invitation only event and we only looked for few and the best. The best means no discriminating if the cars are from Japan, US or Europe. We wanted to see which street machine would be worthy of the name "Touge Monster".
The touge is a winding road in the mountains. The car needs to be well balanced with torque, overall power, suspension settings, aerodynamics etc. As long as this series is to judge which car rules the touge, it doesn't matter if the car can go fast only on the straights. Or if the car is a great drift car. American Touge has been from the beginning and will always be the search for the car with the highest overall balance on the touge streets. We got a hellava line up folks.

HISTORY

The American Touge series started in 2004. Back then the theme was to see how Japanese cars are being tuned in the US. Were they up to par with the home grown tuners or were they still ways to go? We found out that US tuners were a force to be reckoned with and Comptech's NSX was crowned the first American Touge Monster. To our surprise we also found a no name shop from Chicago called Top Setup that had the skills to build a Civic that Tsuchiya said was "better than Spoon".

The 2004 success brought lots of buzz and we sought further for the best tuners of N.America. After seeing the DVD, tuners from around the nation sent e-mails saying how better their car was compared to the ones we had tested. We also had many nominations from happy owners and fans. So, an open casting call was conducted. We narrowed down the cars to 40 cars and had Tsuchiya and Kazama drive them all. Vivid Racing's RX-8 showed style and real performance. Mueller lived up to their name. Vishnu proved they can tune the EVO and redeemed their retirement from the previous year. In the end the Comptech NSX could not defend the throne against the XS Engineering R34 GT-R. We had a new Touge Monster.

THE CARS

detail MINE'S R34 SKYLINE GT-R XS ENGINEERING - R32 SKYLINE GT-R PROTOTYPE RACING - LOTUS ELISE with K20A DINAN M3 Mueller Street EVO STOP TECH CORVETTE Z06 JIC PORSCHE 996 TT HASPORT CRX COSWORTH/Dyno-Comp Subaru STI

TIRE REGULATION

American Touge 3 entry vehicles must use tires that are legal for use on all public roadways in either the United States, Japan, or the European Union.