Photos by Andy Hollis, Tom Suddard and Heyward Wagner unless otherwise credited; lead photo by Driftpoint Media
Two guys walk into a bar. Behind them? The still-smoldering Volkswagen Golf GTI they’d just driven for 3500 miles and through 16 track events all over the country. Ahead of them? One of the dumbest decisions they’d ever make.
[One Lap of America: How competitive can a daily driver actually be?]
One or two or four beers in, they came to a consensus: “We should do this thing in the CRX! Just like the old days!”
“This thing” was the 2024 Tire Rack One Lap of America Presented by Grassroots Motorsports, and “the CRX” was Andy Hollis’ gutted, caged, K24-swapped Honda CRX. Indiana to Colorado to Pittsburgh and back, kinda.
One Lap is an absolutely brutal test of mental, physical and mechanical limits, and its weird rule set and spendy entry fee encourage serious machinery. Porsche badges run amok, Corvettes are a fixture, and Andy had long ago mothballed his CRX in favor of a modern McLaren.
So why not attempt it in one of the least comfortable, least expensive cars in our orbit?
The Underdog Factor
We’ll cover the reasons why not later. First, though, let’s go over the reasons why.
The two people behind this odyssey–that being Andy and Tom–are separated by 36 years of age and the experience that comes with that. Despite our differences, though, we realized during our first One Lap as teammates that we really enjoyed each other’s company in the McLaren. Then, during our second One Lap, we realized that we also enjoyed competing against each other in the GTI.
When we’d win in the McLaren, people tended to credit the car. When we’d win in the Volkswagen, people cheered. Obviously, then, our next step was simple: Bring the CRX back and show the giants what GRM was really all about.
Did Tom fully understand what this entailed?
Andy’s wife, Ann, his former co-driver, was less subtle: “Do not bring that car back. You’re going to kill yourselves or at least be miserable.”
In-car video from a past One Lap showed their heads literally bouncing off the roof. This was during a long transit after winning the autocross, and they were sore for weeks.
Tom only had one question: “Wait, you won the autocross?!”
The Makings of a Giant-Killer
The year was 2010 and after decades of competition success, Andy and Ann had tired of the politics and limited seat time of the SCCA national autocross program. Instead, track life beckoned with the building of nearby Harris Hill Raceway.
Looking for a way to combine their love for long road trips with the visceral experience of going fast on unfamiliar layouts with no practice, they found the answer while catching the Tire Rack One Lap of America during a nearby stop. It was pouring rain that day, yet everyone was having a ball. Plus, Ann and Andy knew a lot of the participants. The script was beginning to be written but didn’t yet feature a proper track car.
The One Lap CRX began its life, at least in concept, as a 1988 Honda Civic DX hatchback fitted with a Japanese-market K20A drivetrain swap. Adhering to the mantra of “Never take anything on track you can’t afford to write off completely,” the Civic was built entirely out of secondhand parts. It was essentially a familiar Street Touring autocross build but with double the power.
That first One Lap year was both terrifying and exhilarating, with lots of drama on track and during transits. It was exactly the adventure they were seeking. Inexperienced and seeded 52nd, they somehow finished 10th overall–and were hooked.
Building on what they learned that first year, and with a One Lap visit to Daytona looming for the following year, they opted to swap to the more aerodynamic CRX body shape while adding more power. A Copart search netted a 1989 CRX HF with some minor body damage, most of which literally buffed out, though the rippled door exists to this day. The running HF drivetrain was sold for the price of the entire car, so the chassis was essentially free.
Before our One Lap CRX, we ran a Civic hatch. And after our initial CRX build–which did fine at Daytona–we brought it back this year with more everything, including more aero. But with that improved aero, we’d learn, came some teething pains.
Thus began the slippery slope of iterative development that yielded four more years of One Lap class wins and overall top-10 finishes, including a best of fourth in 2014. At the Texas Mile, it went 170 mph. The scruffy CRX became known as a giant-killer.
At that point, the car had become a very fast but uncomfortable, unreliable race car with a license plate, and it was retired from the big show to a life as a trailer queen. Take it to the track, go fast, break stuff, put on the trailer, fix and repeat.
In this guise, though, it brought home an SCCA Time Trials Nationals class win, the title of fastest Honda at GRM’s Tire Rack Ultimate Track Car Challenge, and countless NASA and SCCA regional TT wins and lap records. It’s also a frequent tire testing mule for GRM.
One of the few rules in One Lap is the requirement to complete the entire week on a single set of tires. Replacements are only available for road hazard issues, not camber wear or excessive hooning. Further, the tires must sport at least a 200tw rating.
For most, this means choosing from Tire Rack’s Max Performance category–tires that are still very much street tires but can tolerate limited hard track use. The Continental Extreme Contact Sport and Michelin Pilot Sport 4S are popular. However, neither of these comes in sizes to fit our old-school wheel wells.
Some teams instead throw caution to the wind and select a Super 200 tire, knowing those will deliver much better dry performance but at the expense of accelerated wear. If it doesn’t rain, that can be a winning move. Bridgestone’s Potenza RE-71RS, the tire we ran last year on the GTI, is the typical choice.
But considering the light weight of the CRX, we opted to go one step further–to Yokohama’s Advan A052. It has similar capabilities to the Bridgestone, but most sizes are physically larger than their numerical designation indicates. And they also come in some unique sizes, like 215/40R17. Most competitors can’t make these last a week, but we had a plan.
Something to consider when choosing tires for One Lap of America: One set must last the entire week, including the transits. We ran Yokohama’s very sticky Advan A052 this year.
Being a nose-heavy FWD car, the CRX barely wears the rear tires, so our move was to swap them front to rear at the midway point of the week. We’d need a tire shop’s help, though, due to running wider front wheels.
Still, we needed to find out what sizes would be optimal. We tested 205/50R15, 225/50R15, 205/40R17 and 215/45R17. After two rounds of testing, the taller 225/50R15 was easily the quickest, more than a second faster than either of the 205s and a half-second faster than the 215/40R17. It took some effort with spacers and bump stops to make them fit, but having some extra rubber on the ground helped our cause.
Hitting It Off
A big disappointment loomed–the CRX now understeered. Big aero requires some major suspension changes to give it a steady platform to perform, and our new Zebulon package overloaded our old suspension..
Eibach sent us a whole box of springs to try out, but we ran out of testing time. So we went for the stiffest front springs supplied–a 50% increase–and used math to dictate the rears by maintaining the same relative wheel rates. Bzzzt, wrong. And while the CRX was much faster with the new aero, there is nothing more annoying than a pushy FWD car.
Still, each day we’d line up for grid seeded by how we did at the very first track. Ours was among the fastest cars at the event, ahead of a bevy of Corvettes, Porsches, BMWs and modern American muscle cars. Giant-killer, indeed.
For each stop on the Tire Rack One Lap schedule, we had to unload and then reload our CRX.
What about Tom, who hadn’t spent 30 years–or even 30 minutes–in the car before pulling up to the start line for his first timed session? A thousand miles of distance and busy schedules meant Tom had only driven the car once, and never with the current engine, aero or suspension improvements.
Happily, he almost immediately bonded with the CRX, putting down fast times and swearing up and down to someday build his own replica. How’s it drive? Think Miata handling but with FWD accessibility and twice the power. It’s simultaneously a total puppy dog on track and a forearm-breaking, downforce-making monster, and that combination is a complete blast–and fast.
The Sound and the Fury
The opening transit for this year’s event would be 11 hours–a real test of the package. Before this, the car hadn’t traveled more than an hour straight in over a decade. Would it overheat? Beat us up? Would the fuel mileage match our E85 refueling plan? As the miles ticked by and nothing fell off or broke, a modicum of confidence began to set in and dread turned to anticipation.
That first long highway drive also set the tone for the in-car experience. With its stiff suspension, noisy engine and windows down–remember, no air conditioning–earplugs were a requirement. And, thus, shouting to communicate. One of the joys of previous adventures was the in-car road trip banter, but sadly that went straight out the window. At cruising speed, we measured an 86.5 decibel average in the car, with 90 decibel peaks.
Sebring, Daytona, One Lap of America: All test a team’s endurance through all conditions.
The flex fuel setup and Hondata phone app were hugely helpful for monitoring the variance in ethanol content and checking our fuel mileage. We found a sweet spot around E50 where the engine had sufficient octane to avoid detonation but enough gasoline to improve fuel mileage to between 24 and 30 mpg.
We even began to play the fuel game, seeing how far we could each stretch a tank. Once, we pulled into the only E85 station within 100 miles to put 12 gallons into a 12-gallon tank. Yes, we called ahead to verify availability.
Hunched and Hellish
For each day’s transits, we raised the front ride height an inch to protect the splitter and reduce camber for more even tire wear. That worked great, although it did require realigning our headlights.
Tom’s 4 inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than Andy, and despite our best efforts, we weren’t able to make one seating position work for both drivers.
So we brought two Kirkey driver’s seats, each mounted to a bracket that put the seat at the right position for its respective driver–kind of. Because the CRX’s main hoop was built around Andy, Tom’s driving position was incredibly cramped. On the bright side, this meant Andy could still drive on the street in Tom’s seat, meaning fewer seat swaps each day.
Initially Tom could only contort his body into driving position for 100 miles before his legs locked up and we had to switch. But by pairing driving barefoot with a relentless desire to get to the hotel (and therefore to sleep) each night, he eventually stretched his stints to 150 miles.
Climate control is a bit of a misnomer in the CRX. Instead, it’s more like climate lobbying involving severely underfunded lobbyists. The car has no a/c, and we pushed/pulled on a bare-ended bicycle cable to move the heater control valve. This meant the heat fluctuated from “mostly off” to “OMG we’re going to light on fire.”
Not a bad setup assuming this year’s route would have normal weather at its high elevation and northern latitude. Instead, we faced a heat wave, sweating for every mile of every transit. We addressed this with two strategies: wearing gym clothes for transits and using our route book as a big air scoop to funnel air toward the wilting driver.
What about sleeping in the car? Yes, we did it. A lot, in fact. One Lap’s schedule isn’t safe, or even possible, without sleeping in the car, so we took turns putting in our earplugs, sitting bolt upright in the crooked Miata passenger seat pressed against the roll cage, and sleeping as much as possible. At one point, Tom woke up in broad daylight, drenched in sweat, parked at a gas station, watching a dude trying to sell a potted plant from the street corner. To this day, he can’t remember the city or even the state of the encounter.
Limping Along
With an event as long and grueling as One Lap, set in turbulent spring weather across the Midwest, drama is always just around the corner. High winds motivating herds of tumbleweeds was the theme in Colorado. Tornado, hail and severe thunderstorm dodging was the game in Kansas. And heavy rain on the penultimate transit through Indiana on well-worn tires rewarded those with superior boating skills.
The single biggest on-track vehicle issue we faced all week was braking, or lack thereof. With the increased performance from the big engine and improved aero, we had more speed to bleed off for corners–and that’s how we found the limits of the Honda’s braking system. The worst was coming through the finish line on the final lap at Hedge Hollow Raceway, not too far from Kansas City, Missouri, only to have the pedal go to the floor a few seconds later.
We were also playing whack-a-mole regarding fluid leaks at the bleeder valves due to a design that has since been replaced at Wilwood. Having to top off the brake fluid reservoir before each session led to some driver confidence issues later in the week.
Another issue: traffic during those long highway transits, as teams had to cover hundreds of miles between each track event. On the way to Pitt Race, the interstate was closed due to an accident. The GPS sent us on a backroad scurry to avoid it.
Sadly, it also sent everyone else on that same route, so we quickly found ourselves in a 5-mile backup. The CRX can keep cool on track, but it barely has enough capacity when still–especially not for extended periods of time.
While inching forward in the backup, we watched as the temps climbed and climbed. Eventually, we took a detour down a side road for a couple miles just to cool it off. Turning around at a dead end, we returned and eventually got through the backup without any permanent damage–so we thought.
A short while later, the steering wheel started to pull. It was followed by a rumbly thumping sound.
Yep, flat tire.
First one for Andy in 14 years of One Lap and likely caused by our detour. And it happened at the worst possible moment: The next exit had no shoulder, so we had to run on the now-deflated tire for several miles. Plugging the tire was now out of the question. Mounting our sole spare, we suddenly felt naked and afraid with no additional backup for the rest of the week.
Bragging Rights
So, was all this suffering worth it? Oh hell yeah–in fact, it was perhaps the most fulfilling One Lap we’ve run in years.
Sure, we abused our ears, our minds, our bodies and especially our poor little economy car. But we did it for a reason, and that reason was to beat as many expensive cars as possible in our humble Honda.
And we succeeded, not just by winning our class but by finishing 11th overall in a 77-car field. This means the CRX triumphed over a laundry list of incredible drivers piloting incredible cars, including new Corvettes, BMWs, Camaros, turbo 911s and even a Lotus Evora sporting lots of aftermarket aero. We even beat GRM contributor Randy Pobst and his teammate, Jason Stormowski, driving a modified Camaro ZL1 1LE. And unlike those days in the McLaren, we found our fellow competitors actively cheering us on, willing the little CRX to finish one more session without exploding.
2024 was the year our Tire Rack One Lap of America story came full circle, from humble beginnings in a worn-out CRX all the way to fighting for an overall win in a six-figure supercar and back to giant-slaying in our little Honda. And while we had a blast and brought home some hardware, this story ends where it started: the finest hotel bar in South Bend, Indiana.
Two guys walk into a bar. Behind them? The still-smoldering Honda CRX they’d just driven for 3500 miles and 16 track events all over the country. One or two or four beers in, they agreed: “We’re doing next year’s event with a/c, padded seats and a radio! Whose idea was it to spend a week driving this stupid CRX, anyway?”
