E-Mail This Article to a Friend Driven The long, arduous journey to Formula One glory BY CHRIS WRIGHT

In silver-visored helmets and flame-retardant suits, a group of racecar drivers are huddled along a barrier at F1 Outdoors — a Formula One–style circuit in East Bridgewater — watching an ambulance pull onto the track. "He was the best guy in the field," says one of the racers, shaking his head as the injured driver gets strapped to a gurney. "That was the worst crash I’ve ever seen," says another. The crash victim, Matthew Lee, is later said to have been devastated by the accident — not so much because he mangled his foot, but because his racing career will have to stay on hold for at least six weeks. As one of Lee’s competitors puts it, "See ya later!" When the stakes are as high as they are in East Bridgewater today, sympathy is not an abundant commodity — even when, as sometimes happens over the course of this three-day event, one of the failed drivers starts to snivel.

To the casual observer, the momentousness of today’s event — the so-called Red Bull Driver Search — is not readily apparent. For one thing, even in their space-age finery, the drivers are more reminiscent of Tom Brown’s Schooldays than of Days of Thunder — perhaps because the majority of them are, not to put too fine a point on it, runty. Formula One does not favor bulk in its drivers. Unlike NASCAR racing, in which the cars are essentially regular vehicles with a few moderations, the stylized, scoop-seated cars used in Formula One require a compact physique. In East Bridgewater, though, many of the drivers take this principle to absurd levels — in full racing attire, they look like a bunch of robo-munchkins. Which isn’t too surprising when you take into account that many of these drivers are a good few years from being able to obtain an actual driver’s license.

The last time America had a Formula One champion to call its own (Mario Andretti, in 1978), the majority of the 150 drivers here today were a decade or so from being conceived. Ranging in age from 13 to 18, the boys (and a smattering of girls) have been handpicked by Red Bull, the sponsor of the event, based largely on their ability to zip around in whiny little go-karts. But the whole point of Red Bull’s ongoing Driver Search is to get these kids while they’re young and raw, all the better to mold them into ruthless, fearless Formula One racers. Red Bull, certainly, is taking its role very seriously. The company doesn’t like to reveal how much money it has sunk into its nationwide search so far, but the figure is in the tens of millions of dollars. "This isn’t kids’ stuff, even though they’re kids," says Maria Jannace, the contest’s founder and chief publicist. "Formula One is huge everywhere except America. That’s what I want to change."

The karts the kids will be driving today, it has to be said, look more suited to a fairground than to a Grand Prix. Idling, they sound like a swarm of slightly agitated bees. Cute! you think. Then the things start moving and you think, Argh! As it happens, these little karts are fast, a fact that is accentuated, one presumes, by their proximity to the ground. (If you wanted to get an idea of what it feels like to be a poodle going 80 mph, this would probably be the way to do it.) The kids skid around the hairpins at impossible speeds, nudging and dodging each other along the way. Every now and then, a kart will flip over — as happened in the spill that ended Matthew Lee’s day — making for a spectacular sideshow of spinning metal and screaming gears. More often, an out-of-control kart will skid to a halt on an embankment, its driver punching the air in frustration. Occasionally, a racer will remove his modernistic helmet and run straight into the arms of his parents. "Go get your transponder!" shouts a man to one of the scuppered drivers. "Hurry! Hurry!"

It’s understandable if emotions run high today — for reasons that go beyond the fact that the kids seem about to kill themselves at any moment. Now in its third year, the Red Bull challenge is setting out to find drivers who can compete at the highest levels of a sport that is, as almost every Driver Search press release informs us, bigger than the Olympics. A Grand Prix race can attract 350 million television viewers worldwide, generating $2 billion in revenues a year. The racing budget for a single team can nudge $200 million. The sport’s top driver, Michael Schumaker, a German, is said to earn about $700 million a year. There is money to be made in Formula One, glory to be attained, but only if you can find someone willing to pick up the tab for an extensive stay in Europe. Right now, Red Bull is sponsoring a young driver named Scott Speed, who’s racing, and winning, in Germany. "Before, I didn’t see myself here in Europe," Speed says. "Getting here seemed impossible."

Working your way up the chain to Formula One in America, meanwhile, is not an option — largely because there is no chain. No Little League. No after-school programs. Not that many people really care. In the US, the sport is, at best, an also-ran to its moneyed, relatively vulgar NASCAR cousin. Even Formula One’s most ardent advocates admit that, in America, the popularity gulf between the two circuits is unbridgeable. While a NASCAR race in this country can draw a television audience of 20 million, viewership for the average Formula One race hovers around the half-million mark. In fact, Formula One racing in the US can’t even compete with sports fishing for TV ratings. As one publicist says, putting a positive spin on things, "You’d be surprised by how many viewers those fishing shows get."

Scott Speed has dreamed of racing in Europe since he was 10 years old. For the vast majority of people who have shared this dream, the probability of actually hitting the big time in Formula One is on a par with becoming an astronaut, or maybe president. For the kids in East Bridgewater today — 150 culled from an initial batch of thousands — that dream is tantalizingly close. The six drivers who qualify today will be a mere two events from landing a sponsorship deal. Monte Carlo. Untold riches. Chicks. Sitting beneath a canopy near the track at F1 Outdoors, a group of young racers struggle to express exactly what a victory today would mean for them. "It’s an aspiration," says Joe Manning, 17, eliciting grave nods from his co-competitors. "That is a fact." This observation, too, is met with somber assent.

Oddly, though, it’s not the kids who show the highest levels of enthusiasm here today.