Mark your calendars, we’ll be hosting our fifth annual open house on March 8th from 10AM-4PM. We’ll be hosting a car show, vendor displays, a dyno shootout and the always popular bikini contest will also be making a return. Freed food will be catered by Tijuana Flats, and as in years past we’ll be donating a portion of proceeds to the Just in Queso Foundation.
The Autosport International show just wrapped up in Birmingham, UK and Titan Motorsports once again had a display in the engineering hall of the convention. The engineering hall is open the first 2 days of the show and is reserved for trade only, allowing a great opportunity for us to meet face to face with our distributors in the UK. The show spans a total of 4 days and unlike its US counterparts allows the public to attend and see the latest in motorsports gear. With many F1 teams calling the United Kingdom home, this is the show where you can expect to see the absolute latest and greatest technologies before they get trickled down into the tuner market. The level of quality of the parts required in these technological marvels truly must be seen in person to appreciate. From entire carbon fiber air boxes for the Bugatti Veyron, to complete billet transmissions for V8 Supercars, there’s something for everyone at Autosport.
Another highlight of the show was the unveiling of the latest SATS Motorsports drift Supra for the 2014 BDC season. We’ve had the pleasure of being a technical partner for the team for many years now and helped supply quite a few parts for the latest build. The team started with a fresh chassis and ground up build for this season and we look forward to seeing great results from the team with Mark Luney behind the wheel. We enjoyed the great hospitality we experience across the pond from our customers and friends and look forward to attending the show again next year and further building these great partnerships.
We’ve just returned from yet another trip across the pond for the annual Autosport trade show in the UK. Whenever we travel to a race or trade event we try our best to take in the local culture and check out shops and manufactures in the region. This particular trip had us traveling by train from London to Birmingham, allowing us to stop in Northampton and visit the headquarter of one of the UK’s most well known brands Cosworth. As a Cosworth distributor here in the states we were able to arrange a private tour of their facilities, unfortunately much of it was off limits to our phones and camera.
The buildings encompassing Cosworths compound date back over 60 years and houses every piece of equipment a gear head could want. This allows them to design, test, machine, and produce nearly any engine or performance part without leaving their compound. We’ve visited many engine shops and parts manufactures in the past and were blown away by some of the technology that Cosworth had at its finger tips. We shouldn’t have been surprised knowing they’ve produced Indy car and F1 engines in the past, but seeing such capabilities in person is a completely different reality. A typical engine shop having an engine dyno is expected, but when you see 3 shop sized dyno test cells designed for F1 engine testing and a number of “standard” engine dyno cells it really puts into perspective the technology Cosworth possesses. All this technology is not just for show as the same machines used to produce F1 engines produce their street geared aftermarket parts. As we toured their engine assembly room we even witnessed a customers Subaru engine being assembled in the same space as a Formula1 engine undergoing routine service.
The Cosworth Museum was open to photography and displays competition engines from nearly all forms of motorsports from rally to Formula 1. The pictures below shows the amazing engines produced by Cosworth that illustrate the technology that goes into Cosworths history of producing competitive race engines for their customers. Titan Motorsports is a distributor of Cosworth parts here in American and carries their complete line of aftermarket products. We’d like to thank Simon and Mark at Cosworth for taking time out of their schedule to show us around.
The Festivals of Speed show at the Ritz Carlton Orlando is one of those shows we look forward to displaying at every year. In addition to taking place in the courtyards of the beautiful Ritz Orlando, the show always brings out the states heavy hitters and cars that may only leave their garage a few times a year. One such vehicle that stole the show was the all carbon Pagani Huayra that Pagani Miami brought to the show. We saw this beautiful car at Sema, however the Festivals of Speed offered a much more in depth look into all the details that go into making this rolling work of art. This year our display included a Ferrari 458, Titan Motorsports M5, McLaren SLR, Titan built Lamborghini Gallardo, Titan customized Plymouth Prowler, and one of a kind Mclaren MP4-12C High Sport. We want to thank Mac Racing for bringing out their great collection of cars, many of which we’ve had the pleasure of working on in our shop, as well as Akropavic USA for displaying their beautiful 458 titanium exhaust.
The Mac Racing team won 3 Best of Show awards for their SLR,Prowler and Lamborghin, the later 2 had both received major updates over the last year in our shop. We’re already looking forward to next years show and have a few builds in the works for the next year to help bring home some additional hardware.
Formula Drift invaded Palm Beach International Raceway this weekend as thousands of fans filled every inch of space surrounding the drift circuit. We’ve been closely following drifting for years and enjoy checking out the competition all while visiting with some of our old drag racing competitors. There was plenty of action and controversy throughout the event with the fans questioning many of the judges calls and quite a bit of contact within the runs. In the end Michael Essa took the top spot in his E46 BMW (you may remember his Z4 car from his visit to the shop prior to last years event) flanked by the Achilles Tires entrants of Daigo Saito and Robbie Nishida. The podium was swept by turbocharged 6cylinder entrants,could we possibly be seeing a changing of the guard in FD with turbocharge entrants becoming the norm over the previous V8s? Who knows, but we like what we saw and always have our door open to the possibility of building a wild Formula Drift competitor here at Titan Motorsports, sponsors and manufactures our number is listed on the site. A big thanks to Cheralyn and the Bridges Racing (Achilles Tires) Team for the great hospitality all weekend.
This weekend V2Lab hosted it’s second Mystery Meat in downtown Orlando. Last years impromptu event brought chaos to downtown, this year the event had the cities blessing and was much more organized as a result. This event isn’t a car show, but rather a gathering of like minded enthusiast to hang out, show off their cars and enjoy the great Florida weather. As a result the scope of vehicles in attendance varies from Donks, VW, Honda, Exotics, Ruckus, bikes, all with modification from mild to wild. It was a great event, a big thanks to Ravi and the V2Lab crew for putting it together, we are already looking forward to next years event.
Thanks to everyone who attended our fourth annual open house, the attendance far exceded our expectations (we had over 750 rsvp on Facebook but estimates show 1,500-2,000 attended throughout the day). Thanks to the gracious donations from our sponsors and attendees we were able to raise $6,250.00 for the Just In Queso Foundation!
A special thank you to our vendors Manley, FuelLab, Royal Purple, DEI, Hawk, Cometic, Brembo, Mr. Gasket, ACL, Eibach, Deatsch Werks,Fluidampr, Race Ramps, Precision Turbo, Gates and Ferrea for their attendance and donations. We look forward to holding this great event next year, and hope to raise even more money for great causes in 2014.
We just returned from TX2K13, the annual Super meet in Houston, TX. What originally started as a Supra meet over 10 years ago has blossomed into a Mecca performance enthusiasts from around the country. This year marked the changing of the guards, as what was once marketed as the annual “Supra Meet” was overrun by GTRs. Sure there were a plethora of clean Supras, Porsche, Lamborghini, Ferraris and late model domestics, but no car seemed as popular as the Nissan GTR.
Thursday we attended the GTRLife night party at Wild Wing Cafe and first got our glimpse of how popular the GTR would be at the meet when the entire parking lot was filled with Nissans latest Super car.
The dyno event took place at Hennessy’s facilities which features dual dynos, one RWD unit and and AWD unit. The RWD dyno had a sensor failure early in the afternoon which prevented many of the heavy hitters from being able to put down the big numbers they intended. While the drag strip has always been the official landmark event for TX2K, everyone knows the real action happens on the street. Houston’s finest have caught on and had their fleet working overtime trying to prevent the street races, however many went down without a hitch. The Omni hotel was overwhelmed with ever inch of it’s parking lot filled with high power cars just looking for their next victim. A quick search for TX2K on YouTube will reveal plenty of entertaining videos and events in “Mexico” for those interested in seeing what goes on after hours.
This year marked the first year in some time that we did not bring our Copper Supra, or any cars for that matter. The Supra was tested earlier this spring yielding the 201mph trap speed, however conflicts with our race team, as well as track conditions for the weekend forced us to make the tough decision to leave the car at home. We’re also currently in the process of doing a full upgrade to our GTR house car, and felt rushing it for this one event wouldn’t be the correct thing to do for this development process. We’ll get an earlier start next year and look forward to bringing out our full arsenal, as well as customers to enjoy what has become the can’t miss event if you’re a performance enthusiast. A big thank you to Peter Blach for putting blood sweat and tears into making sure this event is everything it can be, we’re proud to sponsor such a fantastic event.
Don Omar hosted Drag Mania at Palm Beach International Raceway, showcasing a heads up import drag race along with a concert. Titan Motorsports was on hand to support New Generation with their new rotary powered RX8 drag car while we complete their 2JZ powered Solara. The team finished the day without the event win, however the did set a new 20B 3 rotor world record with a 6.486 @ 211.67 pass down the 1320.
