The Problem
Some race cars are born from decades of motorsport heritage.
This is not one of those cars.
What started life as a 1997 Lexus ES300 — a comfortable, reliable commuter built for quiet drives and sensible decisions — somehow ended up exactly where it was never meant to be: getting abused on a racetrack for hours at a time.
The formula was simple. Take an aging luxury sedan, remove most of the luxury, add safety equipment, ignore the confused looks, and convince ourselves that a front-wheel-drive couch had hidden racing potential all along.
Every unnecessary piece came out. Every weak point revealed itself. Every repair became an opportunity to make a twenty-plus-year-old Toyota product survive conditions its engineers probably never imagined.
It’s not fast. It’s not pretty. It definitely wasn’t designed for this.
But endurance racing isn’t just about horsepower — it’s about problem solving, reliability, teamwork, and making questionable decisions last longer than everyone else’s questionable decisions.
Built with junkyard creativity, garage engineering, and the belief that “it’ll probably be fine” is an acceptable race strategy.
Introducing: the "LEopardXUS."
CHASSIS
OEM Toyota Camry Platform
6pt Lemons/Champ spec cage, 1-3/4 x .120 wall DOM Tubing
POWERPLANT
OEM 3.0l V6, OEM Automatic
SUSPENSION
Lowering springs and stiffer shocks
SAFETY & MORE
Hellfire Systems Fire Suppression | Bimarco FIA certified race seats | G-Force 5 pt safety harness | JG Industries Coolsuit system
Engineering Approach
The approach has always been function first. Parts aren’t added because they look cool — they earn their place by solving a problem. Suspension geometry, packaging constraints, serviceability, strength, and reliability all drive the decisions behind the build.
A background in mechanical design mixed with garage fabrication means every upgrade lives somewhere between computer-aided engineering and old-fashioned trial and error. The CAD model might say it works, but the rocks always get the final vote.
Measure twice. Cut once. Redesign three times. Then cut it apart next winter because there was obviously a better way to do it with even less money in the budget.
Fabrication
Lemons/Champ certified 6-point roll cage fully notched, bent, and welded for race series compliance. No butts or slugs found here.
The Result
An ultra low budget Lemons/Champ spec-racer that is held together by a metric ton of bubble gum and driven by those with even less sanity.
