UNSAFE AT ANY SPEEDWAY

UNSAFE

AT ANY

SPEEDWAY

Our extreme reporter

learns to drive a race car

When I was 16 I worshiped this one racing game at the video arcade. But I always ended up running my car off the road and into the cow pasture.

Today I'm driving a race car for real, and once again I find myself in deep cow manure. I cannot drive a stick shift. I barely know my way around an automatic.

"Maybe you should ask a friend to teach you," said Richard Boren, president of Drivetech Racing School, when I registered a couple of weeks ago.

I have no friends. So I practiced downshifting from drive to second to first gear, toeing an imaginary clutch as I snaked my automatic V6 Mustang through freeway traffic. After all, a qualified instructor will be in the race car with me, so how much do I need to know beforehand?

"Oh, you don't get an instructor," says Rod Plotzke, Drivetech's vice president, who greets me as I arrive at the California Speedway in Ontario.

These adventure columns seem to go better when I don't read the pamphlets. The extent of my preparatory research on this school was looking up "Drivetech + death" on the Internet. No matches came back, so I was happy.

Most racing schools either have you ride with an instructor or follow one on the track. Drivetech, which opened in 1992, is known for letting newbies do all the driving themselves. They are coached only by radio from a control booth

Sharing my sudden fear, Plotzke agrees to give me a crash course (well, hopefully not a crash one) using Boren's Corvette in the raceway's parking lot. I brake, accelerate and strip until finally I slink from first to third gear without a hiccup.

"That's it, you got it!" he says. "You'll do fine." Truth is, we are running late and there is no more time.

Seven other drivers and I are shuttled into a classroom for an hour, where instructor David Dutcher holds up charts and teaches us jargon and flag colors: Green means go fast, yellow go slow and red means stop. Checkered means the race is finished. (And a black flag means there are either problem roaches or old-school punk bands on the track.)

Each lap is two miles. We're not really racing, but if someone pulls up close behind, Dutcher will ask us -- through our earpieces -- to drop to the left so the faster car can pass on the right.

I call my mom from my cell phone, since she always proves such an entertaining wellspring of doom and foreboding for these adventure stories. My father answers, saying that my mother refuses to come to the phone. She has wised up and no longer grants interviews to the media.

"Don't mock your mother in print," my father warns, as I hear her in the background nonetheless.

Next comes a symphony of screaming in which I can make out only the words "very dangerous" and "that Indy 500 racer."

My mother wouldn't know who Dale Earnhardt was had he not died. Sports don't interest her. Sports DEATHS do. She may not know that the Lakers won the championship, or even what sport the Lakers play. But if somebody died on the Lakers, my mom would know all about it. And she would be sure to warn me never to touch a basketball.

"In this case, your mother's absolutely right!" says Plotzke, which surprises me. "In fact, this is more than dangerous. You're a thrill-seeker!"

Students do crash, Plotzke explains, "because they don't pay attention to what the instructor tells them." Earlier this morning, one car narrowly avoided spinning out because it took a turn on the 14-degree embankment too sharply.

"The roll cages make the cars very safe," he says. (This would be easier to take comfort in without knowledge of the paramedic team, 14 firefighters and full-time doctor all standing by.)

Over my clothes I zip a racing suit, a fire-retardant burlap bag sealing off my entire body on a 98 degree day that, thanks to the humidity, feels like 300. I walk over to the cars, in a line following the other uniformed racers. The scene is very "Green Mile," one of those moments when you're glad not to have a certain special someone to leave behind.

I am driver 8, just like in the R.E.M. song. My car is a red custom Drivetech NASCAR Southwest Series juiced by a Chevy V8 engine. I hop in via the window, since the doors do not open. (Why add unnecessary moving parts when only the jaws of life will get me out anyway?)

The inside looks like a sardine can, bare metal all around, with three shiny pedals of doom on the floor. A small camera is mounted on the windshield, ready to take the video of my spill for "America's Funniest Race Car Fatalities."

"It's fine," I am assured by a guy who jabs my earphones in. He plugs them in and Dutcher's voice is now inside my head, briefly replacing my mother's. Watching from atop the grandstand, Dutcher instructs each driver to wave his left arm out the window to indicate that the earphones work. A head sock and helmet are slipped on and I am strapped in.

After learning how to drive a stick only 20 minutes ago, and having shifted correctly only once in my lifetime, I'm now about to ride a high-performance, 400-horsepower race car through 20 laps at speeds of up to 160 miles per hour, surrounded by others who've never driven a race car before, either.

"Gentlemen, start your engines," Dutcher says. A pit crew member waves all seven other cars first, by my request. Then I get the signal. Letting go of the clutch, I stall.

"That's OK," he says. "Go easier on it." I stall again. My request to be last proves fortuitous.

Finally, with the pit crew guy and two of his friends pushing the car, I manage to lurch it onto the racetrack. My mission now is to narrow the gap between my car and the one in front of me to the proper 150 yards. The engine begins to howl for second gear like a W.W.II fighter plane careening towards earth. So I floor the clutch and shift, slowly giving gas as I let off the clutch. But nothing happens. The only thing racing at this point is my heart.

I stomp on the clutch and accelerator like Led Zeppelin's John Bonham on his double bass drum, panicked, trying every combination until some effect is achieved. But I continue to coast at a decelerating 40 m.p.h. I am lucky to be the last car out, but at this pace I will soon become the first car -- and not in a good way.

Somehow I realize the problem is the stick, not the pedals. I am not in gear. I press firmly downward on the knob, then zoom off at 90 m.p.h. in second gear.

Happy to be in any gear, however wrong, I catch up with the others, who under a yellow flag are going about 75. An entire lap is completed before I realize I have a bigger problem than my shiftlessness.

I can no longer hear Dutcher on the radio. I can tell he is yelling something, because his voice has gotten louder and higher. But the earplugs have popped out inside my helmet. He is now Charlie Brown's teacher, and I am in trouble.

I pull back into the pit and coast to a groaning, incorrect stall. My pit guy brings a new set of earphones, which he tapes on because of my abnormally large Dumbo ears. During this time, the other cars do four laps without me, performing necessary safety exercises I will now not be able to.

Another two stalls and I'm off again. This time my radio is loud enough. (I know because my knees reflex each time Dutcher utters a command.) I find a gear and stick with it. I can't tell whether it's really fourth or just second again. But it doesn't matter, since I am able to go fast and it's not my car anyway. We do three more laps in yellow before the word comes.

"OK, go green flag!" Dutcher yells. I gun it into the straight-away. Heat blows from the engine, cooking my legs like an open oven door. I hit the first turn at 100 m.p.h., and my entire body jerks right -- except my stomach and spleen, which remain in place. I successfully negotiate the turn, but negotiations nearly break down. As I grab the wheel and turn left, it grabs me back, tugging with almost equal force to the right.

Alas, I am still too slow. Only 20 seconds go by before I am asked to drop down and let a car pass.

"Clear!" Dutcher then says, indicating it is safe to move right and into the flow of cars again.

I need to go faster. Dutcher also informs me that I am not staying within the hash marks, which are laid all around the track to guide us through the curves (and are much too close to the wall on the straight-aways, if I do say so -- although not as close as those idiots place those cement roadwork thingies to the lanes on the 5 Freeway).

By my 10th lap, I begin to get the hang of it. I let the accelerator up later going into every turn, and gun it sooner coming out of it. I open it up on the straight-aways, managing 130 m.p.h. (or so I'm told, since my eyes are not on my gauges at that point.) I even cozy up closer to the walls.

The 120,000 empty seats in the raceway suddenly fill with cheering popular girls from my high school. I am Vin Diesel in "The Fast and the Furious" (OK, a less buff version). I can't wait to test out my new skills on a 405 exit ramp.

But my NASCAR championship dreams burn out faster than a poorly oiled engine. I am asked to drop down two more times to let other cars pass. The last time, I mishear a command and almost careen right too early, into another car.

The checkered flag comes none too soon and we are called back to the so-called winner's circle. My body is a slick of stinky sweat and my neck has more kinks than the pop music charts of 1964.

"You did fine," says Plotzke as he shakes my trembling hand. There is a pause. Then he adds, "You can't really learn to be a race car driver in 20 minutes."