2025 GRM $2000 Challenge: It’s What Was Under the Body That Counted

You can usually tell how well a motorsports event is doing by the title—the more sponsors, the healthier the event. This would suggest that the 26th running of the annual Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge, held last weekend, is doing pretty well, as the official name this year was the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge Presented by Tire Rack and Powered by AutoBidMaster. One more sponsor, and it’ll need its own paragraph.

Wait, it did have more sponsors: It was held “In Association with HPX Show, CRC Industries, A&A Manufacturing and BendPak.” I don’t know what all those are, but apparently they brought prize money, and this year the Challenge, usually run by competitors for little more than a trophy and bragging rights, offered more than $11,000 in prizes. And yes, there were still trophies.

The first Challenge was in September of 1999, and there were no sponsors then, and barely an event, because it was supposed to just prove a point as enunciated by Tim Suddard, the founder of Grassroots Motorsports magazine.

After a day of racing at Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta (see? It was just “Road Atlanta” back then), Suddard said the literally-around-a-campfire discussion turned to the lamentably high cost of amateur racing. As Suddard recalls it, he said at the time: “I bet you could build a car and put it on track for less than $2000.”

Credit where credit is due, this may or may not have been inspired by a story done by Car and Driver not long before, from an idea hatched by Executive Editor John Phillips: Racing with a $1000 budget. We had to find, and compete in a little interscholastic game, three cars, selected by magazine editors, that we had to locate and buy for less than a grand.

We decided to source them from three different continents: Frank Markus found a first-gen Volkswagen Rabbit GTI; Phil Berg got a 1982 Mazda RX-7 (RX-7s and GTIs were cheap, if you can imagine that), and I bought a Chevrolet Camaro Berlinetta with a V-8. The Camaro was potentially the most expensive car of the three: Mine came with an enormous dent in the driver’s door, thus reducing the price to an acceptable level.

We prepped all three for race day, which largely consisted of making sure there was air in the tires, oil in the crankcase, and gasoline in the fuel tank. We took the three cars to Chrysler’s Chelsea Proving Grounds to get performance numbers, then on a drive through the Southern Michigan countryside, and then ended up at Butler Battleground Speedway, a three-eighths-mile track near Quincy, Michigan, that has been in operation since 1952. It was a pretty notorious oval, with a dirt surface that contained a startling number of rocks. In the end, Frank’s GTI won, followed by my Camaro, then Phil’s RX-7.

Originally, the GRM Challenge wasn’t all that different: Suddard floated the idea of building a race car with a $1500 budget, and put his money where his mouth was by funding three cars, including his own “somewhat scurvy” Ford Mustang. There would be an autocross, a drag race, and a concours. The staff mentioned what they were up to on the magazine’s website, and suddenly readers wanted to participate. Nearly two dozen teams showed up with cars to join the three staff-prepared entries. Guido the clown won overall (he actually is a professional clown) in an MG Midget powered by a junkyard Cosworth Vega engine.

This year, 63 teams answered the call at the Challenge’s usual site, Gainesville Raceway, the NHRA-owned drag strip that also offered plenty of room for the autocross, and a big covered area for concours judging, in case Florida’s rainy season arrived a bit early. (It did, both this year and at the original event in 1999, but the first one dealt with an actual hurricane. Suddard promptly moved the suddenly-annual Challenge out from under hurricane season.) The drag racing and autocross occurred on a rain-free Friday and Saturday, with only the Sunday concours forced under cover by a day-long storm.

As always, some competitors just treated the Challenge as a run-what-ya-brung event, showing up with Toyota Camrys and Honda Civics that were essentially their daily drivers. Other teams—and we mean teams, with a dozen or more people—arrived with intricate year-long builds, many of which involved chassis swaps, body swaps, and engine swaps. The creativity has yielded quarter-mile drag strip times in the 10-second range, a little quicker than a 2025 Porsche 911 Carrera S, or roughly the same as you’d expect from a new Chevrolet Corvette Z06.

These are some serious cars, often lightened, usually boosted by outsized turbochargers or stuffed with V-8 engines, or sometimes a combination of all three. But that’s de rigueur for the Challenge, which has hosted everything from a C4 Corvette equipped with a Chaparral-like sucker device powered by an inboard snowmobile motor that very literally sucked it down to the asphalt for the autocross (a project executed by curious professional engineers, who swore it was all done during work lunch breaks and after-hours) to a Zamboni that wore its body over a Mazda Miata.

This year’s overall winner was Texan Derek Penner’s 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, a V-dub in name only, courtesy of its trimmed-down body, draped over a turbocharged Miata engine and a welded tube-frame chassis. How do you do that within the now-$2000 budget? Lots of junkyard scavenging, spare-parts deal-making, and volunteer labor is not counted towards the budget, which is sort of like automotive journalism. (By the way, inflation being what it is, it was up to the teams whether they wanted to keep their build under $2000 and possibly win valuable prizes. Entries that went over budget or failed to properly document the process for the judges were still allowed to compete. All the entries mentioned here and below were built for sub-$2000.)

Adding to the Beetle’s appeal was an odd-looking, brilliantly conceived trailer that the Volkswagen towed to ferry luggage and spare parts and separate autocross tires and wheels. The ball hitch for the trailer was in the center of the Volkswagen’s roof, connected to the trailer by a bar that was fashioned out of a piece of round tubing, bent to match the contour of the Beetle’s body, attached on the other end by a just-because-they-could inboard trailer suspension system.

The overall results are compiled from the autocross, the concours, and the drag race (in which the Beetle did quite well, aside from hitting the track wall, which necessitated a long night of pre-concours repairs), for which Penner and crew took home the biggest trophy and a $1000 gift card from the Tire Rack. That was in addition to another $500 gift card for winning its class in the autocross (there are six classes now in the Challenge, five more than there were at the original, and they largely depend on tire size).

Second overall was last year’s winner (which we featured here), the Material Girls Racing’s 1985 Ford Ranger, which is really a lightened pink Ranger body over an all-wheel-drive 2013 Ford Taurus Police Interceptor chassis, with a twin-turbocharged V-6, lightened by 900 pounds. Read our story to see how the Ranger was built, complete with in-progress photos.

And third was team Identity Crisis, with their once-wrecked 2006 Pontiac Solstice. Which, of course, wasn’t just a Solstice: It was wearing most of the body of a 1971 Triumph Spitfire and powered by a very-turbocharged Ecotec four-cylinder. As with many of the Challenge cars, the construction of the Solstice-Triumph mashup was documented with a build thread on the magazine’s forum, complete with photos, and yes, that poor Solstice was pretty much damaged on all four corners by the wreck that made the leftovers affordable. But the air conditioning still worked, critical for Florida.

There were plenty of other fascinating cars, including the annual entry from a Georgia Tech team named Wreck Racing. This year, they brought a 1987 Chrysler Conquest which wasn’t, if you’ve been keeping up, a Conquest at all. Underneath was an all-wheel-drive, 4.2-liter-V-8 2005 Audi S4, with a specially-designed tube-frame front and rear chassis with a pushrod suspension. A Wreck Racing team has been competing in the Challenge for years, each time with some new faces, because they are college kids and they graduate and go on with their lives. There’s a build thread on Instagram for the Conquest-Audi.

There are so many interesting builds it’s hard to leave any of them out—the Saab Sonett-bodied 1991 Miata from the More Tools Than Sense Racing team; Barely Functional Racing’s 1964 Volvo P1800, built for less than $1000, and Night Owl Racing’s rear-engine 1989 Ford Festiva that looked like a Group B rally contestant that was part wrecked Porsche 944 and part Toyota Camry, with a little Mazda 3 thrown in. Build thread here. (This whole body-swap phenomenon is comparatively new, and accomplished by, if the build thread photos are any indication, borrowed tractors or front-end loaders or excavators and often several friends’ aching muscles, used to pluck bodies off, gently place the new-old bodies back on.)

We’d be remiss in not mentioning the weekend-long presence of professional racer and two-time Rolex 24 at Daytona class champion Randy Pobst, who was drafted by multiple teams to drive in the autocross competition because he’s faster than everyone else. Or at least me. He’s also nicer.

Dates for the 2026 Challenge haven’t been finalized, but expect it to be around this same time of the year, and spectators are welcome. Already starting a build thread for next year: The owner of a Volkswagen Thing. Wonder what’ll be underneath?