Driven to Find the Right Formula : Motor racing: Zak Brown of North Hollywood is taking his youth and high ambition to GM Lotus circuit in Europe.

In a time and a place where 20-year-old men are routinely spotted dodging cars aboard their skateboards, Zak Brown of North Hollywood is a breath of, well, carbon monoxide.

Brown leaves later this month for Europe where he will--barring unexpected get-togethers with heavy, fixed objects such as concrete walls--spend several months and perhaps the rest of his life racing cars in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other hotbeds of speed. He has qualified for and acquired sponsorship for a season-long crack at the highly competitive Formula GM Lotus Racing Series, a 20-race extravaganza of thrills pitting man and a 175-horsepower, single-seat car against some of the finest road-racing courses in Europe.

The fact that Brown is only 20 separates him from every other racer on the circuit. The next youngest is 25. The former Taft High student with the lofty goal of one day racing on the prestigious Formula One circuit knows he is on the fast track. He would have it no other way.

“I want to do it quickly,” Brown said. “I know this sounds stupid, but I want to get in over my head and see how I do. I know what I want.”

With a successful season on the Formula GM circuit next year, Brown could be well on his way to the Formula One circuit.

In 1990, competing on the national go-kart circuit, Brown had posted 14 victories in 35 races and won the U.S. Championship, a feat that caught the eye of potential sponsors. A few months later he was testing the much more powerful Formula Ford cars. And in his first Formula Ford race, at a track near London late in the year, Brown won the event, shocking the veteran competitors.

And himself.

“It was raining heavy and I was so new to these cars, that all I really had in mind was a respectable finish,” he said. “I was thinking top 10, top 15 maybe. But then I got into the race and I started passing people. First a few cars, then a lot of cars. And all of a sudden I started thinking, ‘Can I win this thing?’ ”

When he did, people with money took notice of his special skills. Geoff Kendall, head of Netherlands-based Eagle Racing Management, was the first to step forward. Quickly, Brown had signed on with the veteran team and two months ago began testing the 175-horsepower Formula GM cars in Europe.

And again, Kendall liked what he saw. Brown will be his driver in a 10-race German Formula GM series and an eight-race circuit in the Netherlands.

“It’s all happening in a hurry, but that’s what I asked for,” said Brown, who began racing go-karts at age 13 after his father, a racing fan but never a driver, had taken him to tracks in Riverside and at the Orange County and Los Angeles County fairgrounds as a youngster.

“My father was just interested in watching racing,” Brown said. “My interest, right from the earliest days, was in more than that. I knew I wanted to drive.”

As he grew up, racing began to take over. By the time he was at Taft and later University High in Santa Monica, where he graduated in 1989, Brown was a full-time race car driver. And part-time student.

“I was never a school person, not after I discovered racing,” he said. “I was so convinced that I was going to be in a Formula One car some day, racing the greatest tracks in the world, that I sort of went into a tunnel, focusing only on that. I’d be in school but I’d be thinking, ‘Shouldn’t I be out driving someplace?’ After all, that was what I was going to do with my life. I’d sit in history classes and learn about the Wahoo Indians or something and how they ate cockroaches. And I’d be thinking, ‘Is this really gonna’ help my racing career? I thought not.

“But I did get my high school diploma. Because I knew that without that, people would think I was an idiot.”

The lure of racing, Brown said, is the feeling that sweeps through the body when he is strapped into the car at the start of a race and the wide-eyed thrill of taking a car to its maximum speed around a turn. It is a feeling, he said, that cannot be duplicated.

“The whole deal is banging wheels with someone at 140 miles an hour and wondering who’s going to let off first,” he said. “For me, the thrill is greatest because I know that it won’t be me backing off. I just won’t do it. I won’t let it happen. It’s wondering just how far you can push this thing before you lose it.”

Brown has lost it. In July, during a Formula Atlantic race in Willow Springs, Calif., he went into a long, sweeping turn with another car ahead of him. Brown tried to get by the car on the outside, but the lead car veered high and forced Brown into a thick wall of hay bales.

As a bone in his right arm snapped, Brown thought not of the pain, he said, but of the disappointment.

“There were potential sponsors there, and I blew it,” he said. “I was so disappointed.”

And always, Brown said, is the knowledge that to back off on the accelerator is to admit defeat.

“Slowing down when you feel danger in a car is a very, very natural reaction,” he said. “Nothing is more natural than to want to take your foot off the accelerator and hit the brake when you feel you’re about to lose it. But all the time, in any of what we call those big moments, you can’t let up. You’ve got to keep your foot on the floor if you want to win. So without backing off, you go into a corner and you wonder what’s going to happen, you wonder if at that moment, your time is up.”

Not likely. Because along with Brown’s flamboyance are solid racing skills. He has proven, at a very young age, that he knows how to win. He will, he vows, do it at a much higher level some day.

“I just know, in my heart, that I’ll end up on the Formula One circuit,” he said. “I just know it will happen. And being just 20, that’s such an advantage. I’m staying a step ahead of the competition, ahead of the guys I’ll be racing against.

“At first, my friends thought it was just a phase I was going through. They were into baseball and the usual stuff. I’d go racing on weekends and they’d say, ‘Bitchin’ ’ and they’d come to watch and figure I’d outgrow it. They thought it was just a fun hobby for me.

“I think they all know now that racing has always been much more than that for me.”