These Are 10 of the Unlikeliest Race Cars of All Time

Up until very recently, the Toyota Prius was actually a mainstay of Super GT’s GT300 class, mixing it up with conventional GT3 machinery and spec Mother Chassis silhouette racers. For a while the Prius GT300 was even mid-engined — until regulators closed that loophole several seasons ago. Around that time, APR Racing delivered a new Prius GT300 based on the then-latest model that moved the engine ahead of the driver, but maintained the hybrid system to stay true to the Prius’ roots. Only, the internal-combustion component in this particular Prius was a 5.4-liter V8 out of the Lexus RC F GT3. Yeah, that’ll do it.

You may be surprised to learn that Toyota used to offer a flagship sedan in Japan called the Mark X, and it was the Mark X that served as the inspiration for another GT300-class machine. This Mark X, campaigned by Saitama Toyopet GreenBrave racing, was built on a Mother Chassis design — Super GT speak for a formula that incorporates a spec monocoque, engine and gearbox. The MC route provides a way for teams to enter with their own cars at a reduced cost, and even though it’s fallen out of usage in recent years, it’s one of the major reasons why Super GT’s grid has long been one of the most diverse in all of motorsport. Personally, I find the melty rear-end of the GreenBrave car amusing.

For more than 20 years, Corvettes have been a mainstay of the GT class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. But back in 1995, General Motors wasn’t interested in contesting the world’s greatest endurance race, so it fell on Doug Rippie Motorsport to bring America’s sports car to the Mulsanne. The result was the baddest ZR-1 of them all — a converted production car with a nasty body kit and 525-horsepower “Black Widow” LT5 — piloted by an American and Canadian crew, mixing it up with the best McLaren, Porsche, Ferrari, Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Lister, Jaguar and even Venturi had to offer. Yeah, they just don’t do it quite like they did in the ‘90s anymore, do they?

The first-generation Toyota RAV4 was the raddest-looking little SUV you could imagine, but it wasn’t exactly the raddest to drive. Enter Loránd Ludescher’s RAV4 hill-climb conqueror, with the 3S-GTE mill out of an MR2 and a period-correct Castrol white, green and red livery to match. A RAV4 GT-Four built to give the Mitsubishi Pajero Evolution a little competition would have been sick.

The grandaddy of all Mercedes sports sedans, this 300SEL 6.3 was prepared by AMG just four years after the company was founded, and long before it was formally brought into the Silver Arrows fold. The “Red Pig,” as it came to be known, won its class and claimed second overall at the 1971 24 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps — a stellar result for a sedan more commonly associated with ferrying ruthless heads of state than winning car races.

The British Touring Car Championship is no stranger to weird race cars, being a place where completely unenthusiastic family sedans bash into each other and get up on two wheels for sport. But few BTCC contenders were more odd than this Volvo 850 estate, built by Tom Walkinshaw Racing and run in the 1994 season. It wasn’t particularly successful — Team Volvo ended the year 14th in the points tally — but that had nothing to do with the fact it was a wagon. “The aerodynamics of the estate were slightly better than the saloon,” one of its drivers, Rickard Rydell, recalled in 2014. “The deciding factor, however, was that the estate would attract more attention.”

To be perfectly frank, very little of this Rolls-Royce Corniche, heavily modified to compete in the 1981 Paris-Dakar Rally, actually belongs to the house of the Spirit of Ecstasy. As Robb Report tells it, the original V8 was swapped — sacrilegiously to some — with a Chevy small block. The chassis and gearbox belonged to a Toyota HJ45 pickup and many of the exterior panels were replaced with fiberglass lookalikes. But it was a striking enough image to gain the endorsement of Christian Dior’s Jules aftershave, and it did more than bring a luxurious flair to the dunes. Legend has it the big bruiser was actually quite competitive.

Between 1978 and 1986, motorsports outfit Michelotto built 11 examples of the Ferrari 308 GTB built to contest national rallies as well as some World Rally Championship events. In 1982, a 308 GTB claimed second at the WRC’s Tour de Corse rally in France; meanwhile, as Ferrari tells it, Michelotto was cracking away at a Group B version. The banning of the category in 1986 put a stop to that, though all of the company’s hard work wasn’t in vain. It informed the first great Ferrari supercar: the venerable GTO.

Remember when Mitsubishi was briefly trying to rebrand itself as a forward-thinking maker of quirky, sustainable vehicles in the early 2010s with the i-MiEV? Well, that exercise happened to spawn a Pikes Peak Hill Climb challenge, in the form of the i-MiEV Evolution. Unfortunately, no great official images of it exist, so you’ll have to make do with this one, where you can at least tell that the i-MiEV Evo took the form of a production i-MiEV shell with roughly another i-MiEV’s worth of body encircling it. Believe it or not, it finished 8th in that year’s competition.

What business does the Ford GT — a car literally made to commemorate the manufacturer’s victories at the 24 Hours of Le Mans — have on any list of unlikely race cars? Well, when Ford revived the GT40 back in the early 2000s, it never intended to race the car. Therefore, every racing variant of the GT you see from that era — like Robertson Racing’s GT-R GT2 built by Doran Racing, seen here — was a privateer effort with no factory support.

This would of course change with the second-generation GT that entered production in 2016. Ford Chip Ganassi Racing campaigned that car with factory backing in IMSA as well as the FIA World Endurance Championship until 2019. However, that shouldn’t overshadow the achievements of the plucky Robertson squad, which took home third in the GTE-Am class at the 2011 24 Hours of Le Mans.