Fewer than 5,000 people in the world have actually driven a Formula One race car. And yet here I am, my rear end a couple of inches off the asphalt of the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fastening the five-point harness of an F1 car that can go from zero to 170 mph and back to zero in less than 10 seconds. I am not, by any definition, a professional driver. Aside from a few flagrant speeding tickets, I have no qualifications to operate this vehicle at all.
The pit crew checks over the monstrous Bridgestone slicks and the crew chief shouts instructions about breaking hard and breaking early. Roger that. I flip the visor of my helmet down and grip the Frisbee-size steering wheel, its colored lights and digital readouts indicating, I'm sure, something critical. The 700 thoroughbreds whine violently when I so much as brush the accelerator with my toe. Then the crew gets behind the vehicle — a retired 1997 Arrows team car — and starts pushing, yelling, "Go! Go! Go! " I release the clutch and, every muscle in my arms twitching with adrenaline, take off down the straightaway in second gear, the 3.5-liter engine howling like a band of chain saws.
So what does it take to squeeze — and I mean squeeze — yourself into the world's most technically advanced race cars? Turns out just a few thousand dollars, a driver's license, and a tolerance for Sin City. LRS Formula USA, founded in 2005 by a short, brooding Frenchman named Pierre-Louis Moroni, offers a one-day session called the "Warm-Up Program" for $3,400. LRS isn't so much a driving school as it is a gatekeeper to a uniquely stomach-scrambling ride. "We're not training anyone to make the F1 tour," Moroni tells me. "We're giving you an experience."
Today, there are eight other guys looking to get experienced. We're dressed in red, white, and blue jumpsuits and look like a ragtag group of Ricky Bobby impersonators. But before we shake 'n' bake in the Formula Unhh cars, we start off in the much less powerful F2000s to learn the lines of the 10-turn, 1.5-mile track. The F2000s are open-wheel four-speed Fords that, with just one-fifth of the F1's horsepower, are basically go-karts on steroids.
Two instructors from the Mario Andretti Racing School, which works in collaboration with LRS, take off in red BMW Z3s. We follow after them like greyhounds — old, hobbled, and partially blind greyhounds—chasing a bunny. The track is tightly coiled with S-turns and switchbacks and there are just two short straightaways. Thankfully, there are no concrete walls in sight — just plenty of gravel and open space for drivers, like the guy to my right who just oversteered into a right-hander, to spin out in a painless gray storm of dust.
The F2000s are outfitted in sticky street tires, and I dig hard into the turns, coming in tight and shooting out wide onto the rumble strips, hammering the clutch to get into third and fourth gears once the track opens up. I'm topping out at about 90 mph and the back end is fish-tailing through nearly every turn. After we pull into pit lane, I hear an F1 guy ask the Andretti instructor how the journalist did. "He's a little wild," he says. And that's what's great about the F2000s — you can afford to be a little wild. Which is not the case, as I'd soon find out, with the F1.
