David Brabham among the motorsports pros on green racing panel at the MIA-SEMA "The Race Has Gone Green" Conference during the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.

Kevin Rohlwing, senior vice president of training for TIA, will present a SEMA webinar summarizing TPMS technology currently used on foreign and domestic vehicles and the latest relearn principles.

Organizers plan to give the Paint, Body & Equipment section more prominence at 2010 SEMA Show.

Exhibitor applications for the 2010 SEMA Show will be available in mid-March on www.SEMAShow.com. Forms must be returned by May 7 in order to participate in the priority space selection process.

SEMA again helped turn back legislation in the Washington Legislature that would have implemented a vehicle scrappage program for passenger vehicles more than 15-years old.

Ford is accepting the final proposals for its annual project vehicle program, due March 1. Act now if you're planning a Ford, Lincoln or Mercury project for 2010.

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 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.