Torque Cars online magazine

We have decided to push ourselves forward as an online magazine. Hence we have a new domain and site to focus on this aspect of Torque Cars.

After much deliberation we have decided to focus on what we are good at rather than chase product sales or other aspects of business.

Hopefully we will attract new advertisers to our TorqueCars Brand and it will enable us to focus on delivering topical fresh content on a more frequent basis.

In order to survive we need to raise funds, one way to do this is by increasing the sponsors and advertisers around the site.

We have made the site more attractive to advertisers and have invested heavily in marketing to lift our traffic levels and help us compete with the large companies out there, despite running everything with volunteers working from home.

People still haven't spotted the intentional pun in our name - TorqueCars - we talk about cars? Torque Cars - get it? Ok then, perhaps you were one of the more observant people out there and we didn't need to point this out.

The primary areas we will focus on are.

• Tuning
• Styling
• In Car Entertainment
• Maintenance
• Automotive news

The forum is gaining popularity with many regular supporters, all of whom we would like to thank for their loyal and enthusiastic support.

Hopefully we will start to produce a monthly downloadable PDF magazine based on our new articles or site updates and feature member cars and projects.

Power Mods and tuning cars

So we've been busy updating our site and have the following new articles this month.

Power mods recommended for your car.

These are the mods that are usually performed by our members, decide how far you wish to go in your tuning project before you get going.

Getting the right mods for your planned usage of the car is essential. Stage 3 (competition) mods just don't work well on the road difficult in stop start traffic.

Stage 1 mods: Suspension upgrade (drop 30-40mm),Alloy wheels,Panel air filter,Lighter flywheel,Sports exhaust,Remap.

Stage 2 mods: Power clutch,Fuel injector & fuel pump upgrades,Fast road cam & vernier pulleys,Ported and polished head,.

Stage 3 mods: Internal engine upgrades (pistons/head/valves),Engine balancing,Competition cam,Adding or upgrading forced induction (turbo/supercharger),Sports gearbox.

Your goal when tuning the engine should be a wide torque curve. You don't want all the power to be at the top end of the rev range unless you are creating a competition car.

One of the best mechanical modifications you can do to your NASP engine is to fit a fast road cam .

 The intake and exhaust durations play a large part in your cars power band, but be careful here, getting this wrong can upset the idle and make the car impossible to drive in traffic. You'd need to follow a cam upgrade with other mods and finish with a performance chip to fully release the power gain.
You will need to ensure that the engine is not starved of fuel so will need to uprate the fuelling. Frequently power losses, flat spots and erratic idling after modifications are done can usually be traced to fuel delivery or timing issues.Uprated injectors will enable you to supply sufficient fuel to the engine. If you've uprated your fuelling with bigger injectors you will also need to get a bigger fuel pump to supply it.

New articles and models we've covered this month...

http://www.torquecars.com/porsche/cayenne-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/vauxhall/gtc-tuning.php 
http://www.torquecars.com/vauxhall/cascada-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/toyota/auris-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/toyota/rav4-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/rio-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/soul-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/ceed-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/venga-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/sportage-tuning.php
http://www.torquecars.com/kia/carens-tuning.php

You'll also note that the forum has been given a facelift and looks fresher than ever. We boast more and more members now.

Official car tuning site relaunch

It is official, after about 90 days of hard work behind the scenes and trialling new options we can unveil the new TorqueCars site (which is still in Beta so you have an exclusive opportunity to view our all new Car tuning site.).

More of an evolution than revolution, our users liked the look and feel of the site but found navigating around it to be quite hard.

We have addressed this with an all new menu at the top with drop down categories.

We also looked at the way pages were laid out when displaying categories and felt that this needed improvement.

We have taken this opportunity to update the page code and rendering engine and have knocked about 30% off our page load times. There is also a funky new mobile version that will be shown to people using mobile devices.

The new look meant we have had to update the photography across the entire site. There are still a few sections that we need to get to, but these are being updated as soon as is humanly possible.

Initial feedback to the new site has been positive with users spending more time on the site and viewing more pages. We have also seen increased sign up levels and are pleased to report that the forums are busier than ever.

New updates to our Car tuning site TorqueCars

We've been busy redeveloping our site. We have released an interim facelifted version of our site and we hope you like the new look.

We've tried to bring the site upto date, the old header image was a little dated and we never quite liked the way the bolt of electricity flowing out from the spark plug looked. So get over and have a look if you are into car tuning or car styling

Our new look is more in line with the type of car tuning and car styling we offer, we hope that people find the new look exciting and dramatic.

The aim was to retain as much as possible the look and feel of the old site but to bring it up to date. We are now using a content delivery network to ensure that our pages load fast all around the world and although we are having a few minor issues with this we hope to get them all ironed out and everything working efficiently.

We have chosen the featured tuning cars quite carefully including a concept design from Mazda which shows the cutting edge of car tuning and matt black Lamborghini with dayglow wheels.

As car tuning is getting more and more popular we feel that the site will continue to grow from strength to strength and we now boast over 16,000 members in our very active and friendly car forums.

New modified car features

We know that TorqueCars readers love their modified cars. Traditionally we have spent a lot of time talking about the many and varied ways to modify your car and improve it.

We have added some truly inspirational features to the site with some of our members modified cars.

There will be more to come shortly so stay tuned and keep reading. (There are a good few projects in the forum that are almost finished including MrB's Skyline, Old Gits Lotus and many other interesting projects.)

To read our latest articles click modified car features .

We have so far provided features on A stunning Stagea, TVR2500 M, Talon 100R, Vectra a MK1 Astra, A Supra, an Evo VI, a tuned Lada and Fingers General Lee look alike the near lee.

We hope to bring you a feature on CountryBumpkins 3000GT (GTO) and on a very interesting Civic with a 2.2 engine conversion.

In addition to this we have spent some time revising and updating a lot of the articles so they reflect the current thinking and best practice when it comes to modified cars.

The forum has also reached the 13,000 member landmark which is very impressive and it is still one of the friendliest and most interesting modified car forums around today.

A word of warning, if you modify your car you must ensure you have told your insurers. To read more about modified car insurance.

Sept/October Torquecars newsletter

Its certainly been a busy time since our last newsletter and we have added a large number of new articles as well as improving and clarifying points in existing articles and updating some of the photographs. Here are some of the main highlights section by section.

Tuning:
We tackle the subject of engine balancing, as well as discussing the performance merits of bonnet vents (and you thought they were just for show), we also cover the benefits of slip diffs and the range of diffs available. Following Badgers and Jakes engine swap projects we featured we thought we would take a look at engine swaps as the ultimate power mod.

Audi/VW owners will find a comprehensive 1.8T tuning guide in the respective Audi/VW sections (links are at the bottom of the site under makes and models!). http://www.torquecars.com/tuning

Styling:
We take a peek at car interior styling with new articles covering car mats and car upholstery. We also look at the aesthetic appeal of motor sport vents. We know that headlamp conversions are popular so we look at the range of options available and also look at carbon fibre styling mods.

No Torquecars member should neglect the look of his engine so we have an article on engine dress up kits and also some tips on caliper painting and fitting neon lights to your car.http://www.torquecars.com/styling

News:We look into and compare the pointless and useful in car gadgets and take a look at how car makers are going to give us more powerful and more economical cars in the future.http://www.torquecars.com/news

Articles:With winter coming we look at winter driving in adverse weather conditions. Taking good care of your air conditioning and using it properly can save you a fortune. For the track warriors among us we look at cornering techniques as well as heel and toe gear changing methods.http://www.torquecars.com/articles

We have uploaded a set of preview images from the Kent Modded UK cars how and hope to add more (better quality images in the near future!)
http://www.torquecars.com/chat/gallery/index.php?cat=3

Tools:
We are pleased to make available a brand new route planner. Free to use for all Torquecars readers.http://www.torquecars.com/tools/driving-directions.php

Due to the large amounts of traffic we are getting we are looking to upgrade our server (again) to keep things running smoothly so please bear with us and we thank you for all of your support.

Welcome to the Torquecars blog.

This blog will keep you upto date with the goings on at Torquecars. I will aim to update it at least once a month but it will be restricted to site news, updates and interesting stories from the torquecars forum.

The last few months have been really busy for us. We organised a modified car show in Kent at the end on June which went down very well. There will be some pictures soon, the prizes were all one by Subaru Imprezas which was not planned we just had a huge number of Imprezas turn up and they won each of the categories. We would also like to thank all of the other clubs who supported us at the weekend, especially Ecruze and Kent Scoobies.

We have also been busy writing new articles, covering aerodymic priciples of spoiler design and servicing the car and we have also been keeping up with the forum. We now have well over 2000 members and that number is growing each day making us one of the fastest growing international car tuning clubs.

Whats next? More articles. We have a number of interesting feature cars coming up and hope to be covering each make and model of car in detail.