Josh Peek made his Tire Rack SCCA® Solo® National Championships debut in 2025 one for the record books. Smooth, confident, and aggressive, the Tennessee Valley Region member and Alabama resident bested 42 other Classic American Muscle-Sport (CAM-S) runners – including the 2023 class winner – claiming fastest time in the class on both East and West courses and the class win with a noteworthy 1.066sec margin.

The CAM-S victory brought with it a bonus: SCCA’s 2025 Solo Driver of the Year honors.

Furthermore, as Solo Historian Rocky Entriken notes, this was the first time this award has been presented to the winner of a Supplemental class.

Although 2025 was his first trip to the National Championships, Peek has been an SCCA Tennessee Valley Region (TVR) Solo standout for several years, a core competitor at events hosted by both TVR and the enduring local Twickenham Auto Club (TAC).

Originally from New Johnsonville, TN, where he owned a small trucking company and helped manage a larger flatbed trucking company based there, curiosity led him to take a temporary consulting job in Huntsville, AL, in 2010.

The interesting advisory position at a fast-growing company hooked him, and the “temp job” became a full-time gig, which he only recently left.

For the first few years, the biggest challenge was the 160-miles-each-way commute to and from his Tennessee home and business in a pickup truck that was not only not fun to drive but also got poor gas mileage.

Fun With a Daily Driver

Enter the low-mileage six-speed 2011 Corvette found in upstate New York that 10 years and over 100,000 road miles later is his winning CAM-S machine.

“The Corvette was one of the first cars I ever bought that was completely drivable when I got it,” Peek chuckled. “I’d always found old hot rods or pickup trucks that needed motors or other work to make them $2,000 runners. And they were fine around town. But when I started in Huntsville – well, driving the pickup truck every day was just insane.

“That Corvette would get 32 mpg on my trip – a little bit of interstate and a whole lot of two-lane,” Peek added. “Cheaper on gas than anything else I'd ever owned up until that point. Plus, it was fun.”

When an opportunity to step away from the trucking business emerged, he took it and in 2015 relocated to the Huntsville suburb, Somerville.

That same year, he joined the SCCA and started autocrossing. Very soon, he began modifying the ‘Vette as the new CAM-S class debuted and quickly caught his attention.

The CAM-S rules greatly appeal to the engineer in entrepreneur Peek, but as he made significant changes to the car (and with worsening rush-hour Huntsville traffic), he was soon forced to retire the ‘Vette from its daily driver role.

(Josh's Corvette had humble beginnings, but by the 2025 Solo National Championships, it was a well-tuned monster. Photo by Will Huxtable.)

In the years since, he has put a ton of effort into getting faster: Tires are the primary focus in CAM-S, and Peek has really done his homework.

“Keeping the tires happy is so significant,” he explained. “The cars are so different than a street car or a street-class car in their ability – once you've built them to the rules – to be able to control the contact patch.

“I set my car up around the Yokohamas because, when I started building the car, they were really the only things you could get.”

Indeed, Yokohama-shod ‘Vettes have taken top CAM-S Nationals honors every year since 2021. In 2025, though, there were four different tire manufacturers represented in the top five, and Peek is running the numbers…

Corvette Cut-Up

Two years ago, he decided to get serious about aerodynamics.

“I finally decided to cut the bodywork up last year. I did all the suspension stuff – coilovers and bushings and that kind of thing – but I really hadn't chopped up the car. It became apparent running National-level events that I was still just nipping at the heels of everybody. They started to allow aero mods and everybody quickly jumped on the aero bandwagon. I felt like I was getting the car developed relatively well, but I couldn't quite keep up. So last winter I finally decided to chop it up.”

Aftermarket companies, notably Zebulon, had several wings designed for low-speed events like autocross, but Peek could find nothing for the front end of the car.

“Everybody I knew that was running aero was essentially detuning the wing to balance the car with whatever they could stick on the front, aero-wise, because the cars understeered terribly with an optimized rear wing.”

Peek plunged into researching “low speed aerodynamics” … and wound up designing his own front splitter.

“I've got a 4ft tall stack of books going all the way back to before NASA – when NASA was NACA. A lot of the low-speed airflow research stopped as planes got faster, but back in the NACA days they did a lot of that.”

Digesting a “whole bunch of really old books on that kind of stuff,” Peek came up with his own unique front splitter design. He then bought a big supply of foam and foam core, carbon, and epoxy, and built a splitter – based purely on book knowledge.

In combination with a Zebulon rear wing (built to Peek’s request), it ended up working incredibly well.

It Takes a Village

While Peek has done the lion’s share of development work on his CAM-S Corvette alone, his progress up the performance ladder has been very much a group effort.

“We've got a group of people here in Huntsville, in the Region, and TAC, that are incredibly fast, and the CAM crew kind of decided a couple of years ago that, since we were all getting deeper into car development and all getting significantly better as drivers, that we should figure out how to make each other faster. ‘Let's take a shot at being some of the fastest guys in the country,’ we said.

“We kinda came to an agreement that we were going to do whatever we could to share every bit of knowledge we had to make everybody faster.”

Josh gives much credit to “the Huntsville community” for his huge success in 2025:

“If I had to pick one thing that contributed 80-90% of my ability to accomplish what I have this last year, it is the community that we have here in TAC/TVR. It really includes the Tennessee and Alabama Regions, too – kind of a mashup of all three.

“The community we have here is unbelievable. I played competitive sports my whole life, right up into college, and I've been around a lot of, I guess, different competitive communities. But when I started autocrossing, I was just completely blown away by the number of people willing to devote significant time to helping me learn how to go faster.

“And of course the other piece to this is there is a significant talent pool here: We have multi-time National Champions that run with our club at least once a month. And to a person, each one of them is actively engaged with helping transfer their knowledge.”

(While he credits his speed as a group effort, it was Josh's driving at the 2025 Solo National Championships that put him in the record book. Photo by Jeff Loewe.)

Tennessee Valley Region, like many others, is working with the SCCA National Office and actively pursuing additional autocross sites. Currently, the Huntsville-centered Region is handicapped by having just a single location (Milton Frank Stadium) with asphalt so thin and fragile the Region now has its own dedicated pavement repair crew.

“In the grand scheme, it's wonderful that we have [this site],” Peek continued. “It’s a challenge, but honestly, I believe it’s one of the things that has contributed to Charles Krampert [TVR Region member and designer of the West Course for the 2025 SCCA Solo Nationals] becoming so amazing at Solo course design. He made it his mission to figure out how to make great courses within the constraints that we have here in Huntsville. So, when you turn him loose on blank concrete, like they have in Lincoln, you get courses like we had at Nationals [in 2025] – just awesome autocross courses.”

He’ll Be Back

“Nationals turned out well – I was really happy with [the result],” Peek said in what is undoubtedly an understatement. “I feel like I drove as well as I ever have on both courses. I was able to lay down a decent-enough run on my first runs both days that I was happy and confident enough going into my second run that I could actually push.”

Josh, his girlfriend of 10 years, Jaime, and her 15-year-old son Kamden travel together to as many events as possible. Josh is prepping a Mini for Kamden to use in a Tire Rack Street Survival school and autocross weekend when he gets his license – more passing down of autocross knowledge to the next generation.

Peek says he’ll be back in 2026 as CAM-S moves from “supplemental” to a National Championship class.

“I intend to try to defend [the win],” he said, although he does have concerns. “I'm a little nervous about the engine aspect of it. If you go back and watch my videos from my runs at Nationals, I was at full throttle for a long, long time on both courses. When you start adding 100-300hp to that full throttle [like some other cars have], that means a lot. But I fully intend to do my best to try to defend this year.

(The CAM-S field was packed with talent in 2025, but Josh managed to stand on top. Photo by Philip Royle.)

“I really enjoy the simplicity of CAM-S. It’s a different kind of community, too. I like the relatively relaxed philosophy and the freedom to be able to do what I feel like I need to do to gain some advantage within the rules.

“Someday I would like to do some HillClimbs,” he continued, “but I don't want to put a cage in the car and add back the 350 pounds of weight that I spent a lot of time and effort getting rid of – at least until I try to defend [the CAM-S win] this year.

“I don't think I'll ever be flush enough to be able to do Time Attack Challenge or SCCA Road Racing, but if the opportunity arises…”

His spring calendar is full of tire testing, early season autocrosses, and coaching – giving back.

An enthusiastic spokesman for the sport, Josh Peek is a truly deserving Solo Driver of the Year.

Main photo by Philip Royle