Roger Penske gave up a successful racing career to open his first car dealership in 1965, but that didn’t keep him away from the track. He began Penske Racing that same year, and one of his earliest acquisitions was the 1966 Corvette coupe. The car had been used by Chevrolet to develop the L88 engine program, and Penske struck a deal with Zora Arkus-Dontov—who quietly worked around GM’s factory ban on race support—to buy the car for competition.

Penske sent a young West Coast racer named Dick Guldstrand to Detroit to drive the Corvette to Penske’s operation in Pennsylvania. [Read More]

SEMA News recently talked with Stuart Charity, executive director of the nearly 30-year-old Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association (AAAA), and Ben Bartlett, the AAAA’s national membership manager, about the Australian specialty-equipment market amid increasingly positive news that Australia is well on its way to an economic recovery.

There are indications that the automotive industry there has begun to rebound, and the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries reported growing vehicle sales—with particularly strong SUV sales—and overall sales for 2009 were expected to reach up to 900,000.

Spurred by tax rebates for business purchases of vehicles and increased purchasing as growing confidence by consumers increases, the sales gap will be much less than feared just several months ago, although the total isn’t expected to reach the record-setting 1.05 million achieved in 2007. [Read More]

SEMA News is interviewing top distributors/retailers in China in a series of monthly articles to introduce the larger players in the evolving specialty-equipment market in China to the magazine’s readers. For this month’s international insight into China, SEMA spoke with founder and CEO of V-Man Tuning, Liu Yan. V-Man Tuning is an off-road distributor and installer that was established in 2004 and currently employs 55 people, including 11 installers.

The company specializes in performance parts for a wide variety of off-road vehicles. The brands that V-Man distributes include TRD, Fox Racing and King Suspensions. [Read More]

As the automotive industry continues to adapt to changes in the economy and consumer spending habits, SEMA-member companies are faced with the decision to race ahead with a new course for the specialty-equipment market or fall behind with the old status quo. In a recent SEMA webinar, "The Major Determinants of U.S. Automotive Demand: Factors Driving the U.S. Automotive Market," moderator John Waraniak, SEMA vice president of vehicle technology, urges members to focus on the upside of the industry’s downturn.
The SEMA Person of the Year Award was established in 1969 to honor an individual for outstanding contributions to the industry reaching beyond the person’s normal job functions. In the case of this year’s honoree, those contributions were extraordinary and ongoing. SEMA was proud to name Doug Evans of Source Interlink Media its 2009 Person of the Year at the recent SEMA Show in Las Vegas.
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