What do you want to know more about?

[G.Irish]

+1 vote for touring car (Grand-am) and how to eventually race in it

bingo, and to expand on there, where to start, the general progresson through a drivers career, I know once you hit NASCAR/F1 that's pretty much it, but how do many of the drivers _get_ there. Maybe starting with 3/4 midgets or carts and work your way up through club racing/grandamerican/dp/etc...

I don't know how the NASCAR ladder works exactly but I can tell you how most of the ladders in the US work, and prepare to be dissapointed.

To rise through the ranks in pro racing in the US it takes money, and lots of it. Whether its your own money or money from sponsors you are able to line up, you are pretty much not going to have very many options open for rides in any of the pro series if you don't have money.

This is very prevalent in the production-based series here. A lot of the Grand Am Cup and World Challenge guys are just rich guys paying out of pocket or guys who run a car/motorsport-related business. The rich guys often will buy a seat in one of the cars on a given team to do a race, a few races, or a season.

With the rented seats a lot of times the better a driver you are the less money you have to pay. When you are really, really good people will pay you to drive their cars. But that is a small handful of drivers. In World Challenge Touring only maybe 3 to 5 guys are in this situation. I'm not sure what the number is Grand Am Cup, but I know its not big.

In the GT series such as American Le Mans GT, Grand Am GT, and Speed World Challenge GT, there are more drivers that are paid to drive. Most of the guys who are paid have a long racing resume but there are some younger guns here and there. Porsche has a young factory driver's program and one American (Patrick Long) was able to get on it through the Red Bull Driver Search program. Unfortunately, having met its goals, Red Bull won't be doing the Driver Search anymore.

So, do you still wanna do some pro racing? Well, if you have strong results in either high level club racing or pro level karting, you could probably get a decent deal to pay for a ride in something like Grand Am Cup Touring or World Challenge Touring. One race in those series cost from about $3k to maybe $8k to run with one of the front runner teams.

For the GT series just multiply those numbers.

So yeah if you can get together some sponsors and you have the results, its perfectly attainable. But it has as much or more to do with money as it does with raw talent.

The pro bike racing picture is a little bit better over here, with about 15 riders getting paid to ride full time in the AMA road racing series and afew more in Motocross and Supermoto. The contingency money is a lot better in bike racing and of course bikes are cheaper. But then there's that whole bodily injury thing...