“The problem with that setup was that there was nothing to do but drive endlessly,” Brock Junior said. “So over the years, we added things like autocross, time-speed-distance stages and regularity runs, where you run the same stretch of highway twice and try to do it in the same amount of time.”
But even that, he said, left participants wanting for more excitement. So in 1989, One Lap’s organizers talked the Sports Car Club of America into allowing them to drive a short section of the track at Hallet Motor Racing Circuit, in Jennings, Okla. Gradually, year by year, the hot driving permission increased to a full lap, then two. Today, it stands at three hot laps, and participants visit a variety of tracks throughout the weeklong event.
“By '94, everyone was tired of TSDs, so we changed it all to racetrack stuff,” Yates said. “Since then, we’ve been to over 100 racetracks.”
In terms of overall distance, One Lap has settled into a more or less consistent 3,000-4,000-mile groove over the last decade, always with a stop at the Tire Rack (the event’s main sponsor) headquarters in South Bend, Ind.
Brock Yates, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, no longer shows up at the events. So his son does all the organizing and emceeing in his stead.

I’m usually dimly aware that One Lap is happening every May, and for some time, have had an inclination to participate. But I’d never pulled the trigger. Finishing the event – never mind winning it – requires not only stamina behind the wheel and a partner you feel comfortable with in close quarters for days on end, but a car that can endure punishment at nearly a dozen track events, as well as the transits between tracks, which are usually hundreds of miles apart. Preparing such a car, and taking a week off of work, can cost plenty.
This year, dim awareness snapped into bright realization when my friend Theodore Goneos asked me – several days before One Lap was to begin – to help him drive transits in an air-cooled 911. What was I going to do, say no?
I arrived to find an interesting assemblage of cars and people. The first car I saw was Mike Hickman’s 1981 Chevrolet Camaro, which he’s been running in One Lap for 25 years, making various improvements each time. The first year he participated, he had been working for a parts manufacturer, using the car as a parts test mule, and he saw an ad in Car and Driver for One Lap.
“I told management that we could put the names of all the different parts companies on the car and they could write it off as advertising,” Hickman said. “I didn’t think they’d go for it, but they did.”
After a few years of that, he bought the car from his employer and kept running it in One Lap every year. So far, he’s put about 140,000 One Lap miles on it, and plans to “freshen up” the car’s fuel injected 383-cubic-inch stroker engine over the winter to get it ready for more.
There were a few other Camaros and Corvettes, too, as well as a trio of Nissan GT-Rs, an Ariel Atom that looked as if it had been pulled from an Apollo moon mission, and a Ford Crown Victoria towing a utility trailer made from the hood and trunk sections from another Crown Vic. Perhaps most compelling, if only because of its nostalgic value, was the 1977 Ford Country Squire station wagon driven by Kent Mckay and his three sons, Eric, Justin and Michael. It was clad in a lovely shade of '70s puke green, and the Mckay clan had decorated the otherwise bone stock behemoth with a dogless leash hanging from the rear bumper and Nebraska tags that read “GRISWOLD.”