#TJS Illegal Touge Racing

What is the Touge?

Tōge or touge is the Japanese word for pass and references any small and twisty mountain roads.

Misconceptions

Due to the increase in popularity of the manga and anime Initial D touge street racing has been highly referenced to drifting when the aim of touge racing is not to drift around corners but to grip and get through the touge as fast as possible.

Types of Touge races

Cat and Mouse

In cat and mouse cars start the race in a rolling fashion with one in front of the other. The winner of the race is decided when: the lead or chase car looses control and spins out, the distance between the lead and chase car is a significant distance. If by any chance the race stays tied at the end of the course the race is rerun and the lead and chase car swaps places until a winner is decided.

Timed Race
There are two types of timed races: where the opponent’s battle at the same time and aim to complete to course in the fastest possible time. These are usually started with cars side by side starting from a dig. The second type is when opponent’s do not battle at same time but are still timed and aim to complete the course as fast as possible, this is similar to how they race in rally.

Racers can also start unorganized battles just by driving behind someone on the touge and using their hazard lights to signal the race and the car in front either lets them pass or accepts the challenge by responding by using their hazard lights.

Popular Touge Cars

Nissan S Chassis (S13-S15)

The Nissan S Chassis is one of the most popular RWD cars out there because it’s cheap, RWD, lightweight and the engine is highly tunable. You can also easily swap body panels to make something similar to the Frankenstein builds people do with honda engines.
For more information watch Donut Media’s YouTube video on everything you need to know.

Toyota AE86 (Trueno/Levin)

Believe it or not the AE86 was popular before Initial D (mainly in Japan) due to it being the cheapest possible FR car out there at the time. It also has good points, it was very lightweight, had a 50/50 distribution and had a very tough engine that was easy to tune. First popularized by Keiichi Tsuchiya then Initial D, unfortunately it all went downhill from there(get it?). Prices skyrocketed and the once cheap FR car for young people became the car people dreamed about, knowing you’d need to dish out alot of money to buy one.

Nissan Skyline GT-R (R32-R34)

The tale of Godzilla is a good one. In the 80s there was rule change allowing non V8 cars to enter Australian races and in comes the R32 GT-R. The R32 starter claiming gold medals everywhere, it won the 1992 Bathurst 1000 beating all the V8 muscle cars. Creating the nickname “Godzilla”.

The R32 originally came with 500HP from factory but it was lowered to 320 and labelled as 276 due to an agreement between the US and Japan after WW2 saying that Japan can only make cars with a maximum of 276HP in order to create more success for US manufacturers. This meant with very little tuning you can get up to 600HP on stock internals. The RB26 engine is also very strong and there are many GT-Rs out there (not just R32s) that have horsepower numbers exceeding 1000.

Old Touge Footage

Thanks for reading, i hope you enjoyed!