How a Lexus SC400 ended up on America’s rally stages

On the second day of the Ridge Rally in Tehachapi, California, a few thousand feet above Jawbone Canyon, I stood behind an outcrop of boulders in a dirt turnout. This was where I’d hoped to capture a few photos of rally cars in action. The shutter on my camera knocked off shot after shot as Subaru after Subaru flew by. The clouds of dust left behind eddied about for a few moments before settling back to the earth. For a brief moment there was nothing but the stillness of the western Mojave Desert. Then something in the atmosphere changed. The yell of the small four-cylinder engines had been replaced by the gravelly shout of a V-8. Moments later, a white Lexus coupe slid into frame, caught a few inches of air, and ripped up the mountain. I had noticed the SC400 and its driver earlier at Parc Exposé, the typical meet-and-greet/car show held before a stage rally, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of its presence until it flew past me on stage. I knew I had to find out more.

The task wasn’t all that difficult, because the driver and owner of the Lexus SC400, Jimmy Veatch III, is pretty well known in the rally community. Veatch, along with his friend Ryan Bakeman, make up the outfit known as Rodnoc Racing. The duo is dedicated to maintaining the excitement of rally in Southern California. Not only do they host regular rallycross events with the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA), but they also take on the immense task of organizing the Ridge Rally, sanctioned by the American Rally Association (ARA), every December. It’s a job they’ve happily handled since 2022, when they brought stage rally back to California after the former organizers hung it up for good.

Veatch’s passion for cars and motorsports started before he could even reach the gas pedal, and everything that occurred along the way played a part in the path to the SC400. “I think I’ve always been into cars. When I was little, I loved Hot Wheels and watching NASCAR. My dad tried to show me SCCA Pro Rally and F1 stuff, but I remember having no interest in that. I always wanted to be a NASCAR driver, and doing 190 mph around 43 cars seemed a lot safer than 100 mph next to cliffs and trees,” Veatch said.

Hot Wheels were eventually replaced by radio-controlled cars, which he raced at the local hobby shop. Gran Turismo filled the space in between. Jimmy got his first taste of real motorsports in the form of a go-kart, something his father insisted would be a better fit than the dirt bike he’d asked for. From that point forward, it was all about getting time behind the wheel and developing an understanding of proper car control out at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond, California.

“I kept bugging my dad for a dirt bike because all my friends had them,” Veatch said. “But he said I’d like go-karts more, which wasn’t with my friends at all, but it was closer to NASCAR than dirt bikes.”

Veatch found his way from paved kart tracks to the dirt after high school by way of Glen Helen Raceway in San Bernardino. The track hosted regular rallycross events, and every chance he got, he was out there behind the wheel of his 1997 Subaru Impreza L. All he wanted to do was drive, and this meant stage rally was out of the question. The cost was just too much to bear, and the idea of co-driving just didn’t appeal to him. That all changed in April of 2021 when his friend Michael Cadwell invited him to crew for him at the Lake Superior Performance Rally in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Veatch spent the next few months getting prepared for the task at hand, learning all the ins and outs of the 2008 BMW 135i he would be responsible for. But when September rolled around, just one month from the start of the rally, Cadwell’s co-driver and navigator couldn’t make the trip anymore. Cadwell planned to call off the whole thing. Veatch had no intention of letting his preparation go to waste.

“Well, I can read. How hard can it be?” Veatch told Cadwell.

After a brief conversation about the magnitude of the event, Veatch insisted on going and, despite his previous aversion to the idea, taking on the mammoth task of being Cadwell’s co-driver. It’s not a job to be taken lightly: the co-driver is responsible for ensuring the driver is prepared by rattling off precise pace notes about what’s coming up on stage (i.e., the type of each turn, including direction, angle, and any elevation change). Fortunately, the event went off without a hitch. Veatch walked away completely hooked on stage rally and on the idea of building a unique, rear-wheel-drive rally car.

“Call it a bad influence, but riding with Mike in his 135i really swayed my thinking,” Veatch said. “I wanted a rear-wheel-drive car I’d never seen before at Parc Exposé.”

All he had to do was decide on what brand of car to use for his build. He wanted something reliable, rear-wheel-drive, and, most importantly, powered by a V-8. Preferably, the vehicle would be built by Toyota. As luck would have it, a friend of a friend was selling an unfinished drift car, a 1992 Lexus SC400.

“I wasn’t married to the SC400 as a platform, but it shares a lot of the same parts as the Supra, which has a good parts following,” Veatch explained. “So I decided that was the direction I wanted to go.”

Veatch had entered uncharted territory, and boy, did he have his work cut out for him. The Lexus SC chassis has been used for a variety of different motorsports, but this may be its first application in stage rally. Maybe a few SC300 or SC400s have been built as “safari” cars, but a run down a rougher-than-usual dirt road is a far cry from the punishment dealt out by stage rally. Veatch made a plan and got to work.

The thing to know about stage rally is that the largest wheel diameter you can run and still be able to use proper rally tires is 15 inches. The problem for Veatch? The front brakes of an SC400 are too large to fit a 15-inch wheel. He solved the problem by swapping in the front brakes from the SC400’s six-cylinder sibling, the SC300. Stock rotors and calipers, equipped with Carbotech XP10 pads, handle the heat just fine. The next phase of the build wasn’t quite as simple, though.

Brakes and tires are probably the most important part of any build—without them, you’re not really going anywhere—but suspension is a close second. Veatch wanted to make sure his setup would hold up to anything a rally stage could throw his way.

After a sit-down with a friend who had lifted his own SC400, Veatch knew what direction he wanted to take the suspension design: Take the King coilovers designed for the front end of the Lexus GX470 body-on-frame SUV and make them fit under all four corners of the SC400.

He still needed someone’s help to make the plan a reality, and thankfully he knew just the person to turn to: “The biggest help in the world is my friend Eric Hellie, who’s a master fabricator who was able to listen to any of my dumb ideas and make them a reality.”

See, Eric Hellie comes from the trophy truck world. If there’s anyone who knows how to build a suspension setup that can hold up to the most brutal conditions imaginable, it is him. Hellie and Veatch started out by getting everything mocked up with a used set of FJ Cruiser front coilovers. The shock towers were reinforced with heavy-duty steel plates that were drilled to accept the top mount from the FJ. With the shock towers now modified for the new coilovers, attention was turned to some troublesome control arms.

The rear lower control arms were designed for the lower mount of the OEM shock body to fit over the control arm, and a bolt was passed through to fasten them together. The new coilovers were designed to fit into the lower control arms, so Eric modified a set of aftermarket arms to work with the new shock body. The next problem was the front upper arms; the area the coilovers needed to pass through was just too small.

All hope was not lost, though. A friend just happened to know the owner of Figs Engineering, an aftermarket specialty shop that focuses mainly on Toyota products. They were the people to talk to. Veatch had the dimension he needed sent off to Figs, and they were able to modify an existing set of arms to solve the fitment issues. A set of heavy-duty lower control arms, made just for the SC400, were built by FDF Raceshop, primarily so Veatch had a replaceable lower ball joint, something not possible with the factory arms.

“We’ve taken impacts from decent-sized rocks, and those arms break the rocks with barely a dent or a scratch,” Veatch told me.

The coilovers themselves are a 2.5-inch shock body, with remote reservoirs that feature external damping adjustment, and 300-pound springs. The automatic transmission was chucked in the bin and replaced with a W58 five-speed manual gearbox from an SC300, adapted via a Collins adapter kit. The engine is stock (it has somewhere around 285,000 miles on the clock) and is kept safe by a 3/16 inch aluminum skid plate under the long front end. To save a bit of money, Veatch chose to weld the rear differential.

An ARA/FIA-approved roll cage was built, a Lifeline fire suppression system was installed along with two additional fire extinguishers, a Terratrip intercom, and Sparco Halo seats. A Racepak digital cluster was installed in a custom aluminum dashboard to monitor the engine’s vitals. The trunk is reminiscent of Felix the Cat’s magic bag: It’s stocked with a spill kit, first aid kit, tools, two spare tires, cordless impact drills, and a jack. Of course, the reservoirs for the shocks take up some real estate, too. The Starlink Mini on the trunk lid allows Veatch to livestream events, if he chooses.

To simplify things a bit, Veatch is in the process of ditching the OEM hydraulic cooling fan in favor of two Spal electric units and an aluminum radiator.

Those of you with a keen eye may notice something a little strange in a few photos of Veatch, something that looks like a dress shirt and tie hidden under his racing suit. Turns out, that’s because there is a dress shirt and tie under his racing suit. Don’t worry, I found out why.

“A complete accident turned into superstition and now, a bit of a character,” Veatch says.

So the story goes, Veatch had a wedding in Long Beach, California, the day before he and Mike Cadwell were taking on the Rally Nevada in Tonopah. To save some hassles, he sent all his race gear up with a friend. The wedding ended at 9:30 p.m., and after he dropped off his girlfriend, Jenna (now his wife and co-driver), he took off for Nevada. He got to Tonopah at four in the morning. A little later, when he opened his bag to get ready for the day, he was shocked to see he hadn’t packed a change of clothes. All he had was the suit he had worn to the wedding. Cadwell and Veatch finished first in class, third overall, their best results yet.

“Call me a little ‘stitious, but there’s no way the suit could go away after a result like that,” Veatch said.

And so the suit has been around ever since. Whenever they podium at an event, he retires the tie he wore for the race. So far, he’s retired four.

Since Veatch debuted the Lexus in 2025, he and Jenna have managed a podium finish in all but one rally. They even took first at the Ridge Rally, which was no small feat. Out of the 31 cars that entered, only 10 finished, and the rally earned a new nickname, “Rut Rally.” The car’s ability to hold together under such extreme conditions speaks volumes to the time, effort, and passion that went into building the only, as Veatch put it, “staged and caged” Lexus SC400 in the country (maybe the world).

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