E-Mail This Article to a Friend Driven (continued)

As the racers scream around the snaking F1 track, their every move is analyzed and indexed by a panel of judges. Their rivals, too, stand and watch and evaluate as the races unfold. "He’s driving his heart out," they’ll say, or, "He’s bogging on the turns." But there’s a lot more than peer pressure resting on these kids’ spiky-haired heads. Because the racers here are minors, they are each accompanied by at least one parent. "Yay!" the moms and dads yell from their little corral at the end of the track, or "Go!" Occasionally, though, you’ll hear a "No!", a "Jesus!", or a "Shit!" One father, having watched his son spin out on a hairpin, actually growls. Another, approached by his son, turns his back and walks away. More than once, fingers are wagged.

After all, it’s mom and dad, especially dad, who have made the "sacrifices" to get these kids where they are today. "I’m the guy who pays the bills," says New Yorker Francis Lee, whose son, Matthew, crashed earlier. "I just spent $10,000 on a trailer and kart," says Nick Aiello, the father of a 15-year-old Massachusetts boy named Tony. And money isn’t the half of it. Very often, these kids are living out the frustrated dreams of their parents as much as they are following their own. As Maria Jannace says, "It’s, ‘I didn’t become a racing-car driver, so you will.’ " She adds, "We put the parents off to one side. They are not allowed near pits or near the drivers." Even so, the parents have a way of making themselves heard.

"A lot of this has to do with them," says Joe Manning, a bespectacled, serious-minded young man who says he might run for political office if the racing thing doesn’t pan out. He adds, "My father loved cars from an early age." Manning’s friend and rival, a short, baby-faced 14-year-old named Mike Tosi, insists that his parents are supportive without being pushy. "They want me to do well," Tosi says, "but they don’t say I should." At this, Manning lets out a little ahem and says, "I think your father puts pressure on you." Tosi thinks about this for a second or two and replies, "Yeah, he probably does."

Sometimes, the parents quibble with the race officials. They’ll complain that their kid’s kart wasn’t as fast as the others, or that the brakes weren’t working, or that another kid willfully banged into junior’s rear end. Sometimes, the parents will bicker with one another. "People need to learn sportsmanship," says Laura Aiello, Tony’s mother, sitting near the parent pen during a lull in the racing. "Some people said some bad words about my son," adds Nick, Tony’s father. "We got into some words," Laura continues. "They gave him the thumbs down," says Nick. Though the Tosis insist they would never deliberately make their son feel bad if he were to fail, there are parents whose fervor curdles into rancor when things don’t go quite right. When the man yelled at his son to "Go get your transponder!" earlier, the tone of his voice also managed to convey the message: "You lost!"

But there are various degrees of losing. A few hours after Matthew Lee was rushed to hospital, his father, Francis, got on the phone with Maria Jannace. "How is it?" Jannace asked. "Terrible," the father replied. "The foot?" Jannace said. "No," said Francis Lee. "He won’t get to finish." A day or so later, the senior Lee doesn’t seem to have fully recovered from his disappointment. "I was mad as hell," he says. "There was no reason for someone to hit Matthew on the first lap. But, you know, they don’t get it. People get crazy, they’re so desperate to win." In the pushy-parent stakes, though, Francis Lee is a lightweight. The day before Matthew’s crash, another young racer had gotten into an equally spectacular cartwheeling situation. As the boy writhed on the tarmac and the mother screamed from the stands, the father rushed over to where his son lay and videotaped the scene.

Maria Jannace is sitting at a table in the Red Bull VIP tent, attempting to describe her own passion for Formula One racing. "Well, I’ve always loved motor sports," she says. "I love the noise, the competition." Nearby, a group of diminutive drivers have congregated beside the pits to watch the hard-fought heat that’s taking place, and to wait until it’s their turn to go tearing around the track. "I like to imagine what they’re thinking," she says, gesturing at the kids. "What’s in their heads? Are they nervous? Are they thinking about their girlfriends? Are they thinking, ‘I may crash’? Are they fearless? Most of them are fearless, and I find that fascinating."

A slight, attractive 43-year-old with dark hair, wide eyes, and a blunt sense of humor, Jannace seems a strange person to lead a revival of American Grand Prix racing. For the last 18 years, she’s run her own public-relations firm, Maxim Sports Management, in Manhattan — not particularly fertile ground for the motor-sports industry. Still, Jannace has focused her energies almost exclusively on finding someone to finance her Driver Search.

It hasn’t been easy. "It took me 10 years to find a sponsor," she says. "I went to all the top companies, all the Fortune 500 companies, but no one would pay attention." Jannace even pitched her idea to NASA, on the theory that looking for a racecar driver is a bit like looking for an astronaut. NASA said no. "I was doing laundry in the bathtub because of this," she says, "because of my belief in this."

When asked why she would devote her life to promoting a sport in a country where no one really seems that interested, even Jannace has difficulty coming up with a reasonable answer. As a kid, she says, she went to motor races with her father and enjoyed them. In college, her friends all called her "Mario" because of her tendency to drive fast. She participated in — and won, she says — a few amateur races in her youth. Her career as a racer, though, didn’t get any further than that. "If you want to be a racing-car driver," she says, "where do you go?" A moment later, a trio of young racers walks by, chattering about their successes. "That’s the satisfaction, for me," Jannace says, looking at the drivers. She holds out her arm, which is covered in goose bumps. "That’s how much I love to see these kids do well."

You get the sense that the motivation behind Jannace’s quixotic enterprise, though, is similar to that which compels her young drivers to seek Formula One glory — a desire to take on the odds, to succeed where others have failed. "When the first American is named champion," she says, "I’ll be up there on the podium." She goes on to recall, with obvious relish, sitting next to the distinguished British racer Nigel Mansell at a dinner party a decade or so ago, and Mansell saying, "If anyone can do this, it’s you — you tenacious little bitch."

Jannace doesn’t sleep much these days. When she’s not fussing over the details of the races, she says, she’s talking to the press, dealing with parents, or — and this is where the real work comes in — tending to the kids. "I never wanted to have children," she says, deadpan. "They’ve taken to calling me mom. It used to bug me, I can’t tell you, but I got used to it." The most ardent of her adoptees, Jannace continues, are three of the four racers who made it to Europe after the 2002 Driver Search — the ones who couldn’t cut it and got sent home. "They call me every day, all three of them," she says. "Have you found me a sponsor yet? Have you found me money?" One of the three, a young man named Grant Maiman, is particularly persistent. "If he doesn’t call me twice a day," Jannace says, pulling out her cell phone. "I probably have a text message or two he’s sent me."