Let's Go Racing

It's a multibillion dollar carnival of guts, skill and speed. People watch because it's terminally exciting---and real. This is no wild-card playoff or made-for-TV golf tournament. This is drivers risking death at 200 mph in machines built like fighter planes. Hollywood's most macho stars---the likes of Clark Gable, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman---have been drawn to the glamour and grit of racing. Of late, racing has exploded in popularity to rival Hollywood's. No other spectator sport draws such huge crowds. Nine of the ten largest sporting events in the U.S. with attendance greater than 100,000 are automobile races. Last fall, TV networks agreed to pay $400 million per year for the broadcasting rights to stock-car racing. Add CART and Formula One, and you're talking serious money. The money to race---an exotic machine can cost upwards of $1 million, and putting it on the track costs many times that---comes from sponsors. They pay willingly because no other sport affords them the opportunity to put a logo on athletes, let alone plaster them with decals. For their part, the drivers do nicely selling hardware, oil, lawn tractors and snack food. "Rubbing is racing!" Robert Duvall says to Tom Cruise in "Days of Thunder" as Cruise's car gets chewed up. And Tom was just acting. These guys drive for a living.

Nascar: Gordon, Earnhardt, Jarrett

Cart: Franchitti, Montoya, de Ferran, Andretti

Formula One: Schumacher, Irvine, Hakkinen

Nascar

Fast Facts The Daytona 500 is the race every stock-car driver wants to win. A quick lap around the 2.5-mile trioval can take less than 47 seconds, which works out to 195 mph. Go to Florida, sit up high in the grandstands, bring binoculars and rent a radio scanner so you can hear the drivers talk to the pits.

Horsepower: A 5.9-liter V8 engine puts out 750 hp at 8600 rpm. Weight: It looks like a passenger car but underneath is a 3400-pound purebred. Speed: Top is 200 mph; a quick lap at Daytona is 195 mph. Nascar stock cars were once modified sedans driven by moonshiners, but now they are purpose-built machines constructed around a skeleton of steel tubes. The tracks of the 34-race Winston Cup championship include high-banked speedways, flat one-mile ovals, short-track bullrings and road-racing vastness. The cars generally cost $100,000, so teams construct at least six models for the different tracks in the series. Dale Jarrett won a $2.9 million bonus as the 1999 champ; his team spent $8 million. Drivers earn more from souvenir sales than they win in prize money. Check nascar.com for more information.

Cart

Horsepower: A turbocharged, 2.7-liter V8 makes 850 hp at 15,000 rpm. Weight: Each 1550-pound car is built around a tublike structure of carbon fiber. Speed: The lap record at the California Speedway is 240.942 mph. The open-wheel CART racers are called Championship (Champ) cars to honor a heritage that goes back to the 1900s and dirt-track races at county fairs. A car costs $450,000, not including the exotic $120,000 engine. CART's 20-race FedEx Championship includes events at high-banked speedways, flat one-mile ovals, road courses and street circuits. Juan Montoya won a million-dollar bonus as the 1999 champ; his team spent $10 million. A dispute between CART and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway led to the formation of the Indy Racing League, which races only on ovals. This year CART drivers will return to the Indy 500 for the first time since 1996, but they will be behind the wheels of less-exotic IRL cars with nonturbo, 650-hp 3.5-liter V8 engines. Check cart com for more information.

Fast Facts Mid-Ohio's 2.3-mile circuit is in a wooded farmland near Mansfield. Get there early and view the race from the end of the back straight as the drivers brake to 40 mph, coming down from 180.

Formula One

Fast Facts Maneuvering a Formula One car around the two-mile street circuit at the Grand Prix of Monaco is like trying to fly a jet fighter in your living room. Watch this classic race from a yacht in the harbor and dress like Eurotrash, hip yet rich.

Horsepower: A three-liter V10 engine makes 800 hp at 17,000 rpm. Weight: An Fl car resembles a CART car, but is smaller and weighs only 1320 pounds. Speed: Top is 210 mph; quickest one-lap average is 143 mph in Germany. The Formula One cars from each team are different, built with aerospace technology. Each car costs about $1 million and takes roughly 280 people to design, build and run. The 17-race FIA championship includes events in Europe, North and South America, Australia, Southeast Asia and Japan. Only road race tracks are used. Ferrari pays Michael Schumacher $30 million to drive; it spends $150 million. For more information, visit the website of the Grand Prix of the United States, indyfl.com.

The Women of Motorsports

Women at the races are no longer just trophy queens. They design the cars, drive the cars and run much of the show. They also fill up the grandstands. But something about the hypersexed character of auto racing also brings out their secret selves. Where you go, of course, determines what you get. In Formula One the women are thin and the jewelry is heavy, which is what happens when the scent of money is in the air. The CART series, which visits the top cities in the U.S., draws the best-looking women: casual but smart, these ladies appreciate power (both mechanical and commercial). Nascar has one of the widest bases of female fans this side of the NFL. They're the ones most likely to flip their tops.

Winning it in the Pits

The difference between first and second place can be tenths of a second, so a pit stop becomes a crucial opportunity to improve track position. In Nascar, seven men can go over the pit wall. Their tools look like those at a gas station, but the jack is made of aluminum, high-speed air wrenches are used and the lug nuts are glued to the wheels to save time. A top crew trains like a football team, practices half a dozen times each day and does the job in 20 seconds. A CART crew is made up of six people and they handle the big hose for the alcohol fuel and can change all the tires in 15 seconds. In Fl, the rules allow as many as 20 crew members to service the car, and the job gets done in less than eight seconds. CART and Formula One cars are too fragile to repair in the pits, but a Nascar stocker will keep running even when only duct tape is holding it together.

Racing Movies

Clark Gable, Elvis Presley, James Garner, Paul Newman and Burt Reynolds all starred in racing movies. So did Tom Cruise, in Days of Thunder, a story about stock-car racing so witless that the cars got all the best lines. Racers themselves admire Steve McQueen's Le Mans, a movie about the race in France. It is rich with the romance of wheels and women and largely unencumbered by dialogue. The best is Rendezvous, director Claude Lelouch's harrowing (illicitly filmed) nine-minute race through the streets of Paris in a Ferrari---a man, a car and a woman waiting in the shadow of Sacre Coeur. You can obtain it from motorbooks.com.

Is Racing Dangerous?

Mario Andretti says there are only two kinds of racing drivers: Those who have hit the wall and those who are going to hit the wall. Events last year were an unhappy reminder of this brutal fact. Fl driver Michael Schumacher broke a leg. Stock-car driver Ernie Irvan retired after a series of concussions. Popular CART racer Greg Moore died in a 200-mph crash. And three fans were killed by flying debris at a superspeedway race. Real race fans hate to see anyone hurt, no matter what the tabloids say.

Backseat Driver

Sharing Mario Andretti's office in a CART Champ car

Want to know what it's like out there? Strap yourself onto a paint shaker, ask the hardware store guy to run an electric drill about an inch behind your head and then tear up $100 bills as fast as you can. That's motor racing. Over the years, the still camera, the telephoto lens and now the onboard television camera have all tried to show us what driving a race car is really like. Target/Chip Ganassi Racing went a little further last summer when it built a special two-seat version of its Honda-powered Reynard Champ car. Mario Andretti, now retired from a long career that includes both F1 and CART championships, was the designated driver. We sat just aft in the slightly stretched carbon-fiber tub, our legs splayed outboard of Andretll's hips, It's a tight fit, and the crew has to lean in to cinch the broad straps of the six-point safety belts. You soon learn why, as Andretti lights up the car's rear tires as he leaves the pits, the Honda V8 turning the Firestone racing rubber into smoke. Your body is pinned into the seat, unnaturally heavy, and you can't breathe. As you rush into a corner at 170 mph, Andretti walts impossibly late and then hits the brakes so hard that the rotors glow cherry red. Your body strains forward against the belts at twice its normal weight. As a long corner comes up, you're pressed against the side of the cockpit with the force of 2.86 gs and you still can't breathe. In a race, this goes on for two hours. Your pulse is 150 because of the g-loads; your body temperature is soaring. And then there's the vibration, the noise and---what's that sound every time you grab third gear? It's not as easy as TV makes it look.

Can you believe this?

A CART Champ car is virtually an upside-down wing, a shape designed to be squeezed harder against the ground the faster it goes. Such a car makes 4500 pounds of downforce, almost triple its 1550-pound weight. At 200 mph, the downforce is so great that you could turn it over and it would hug the ceiling.

Motormouth

"I came into the racetrack and some fans had painted a school bus the same orange as our race car, and I thought, I've arrived."

---Nascar Driver Tony Stewart