North Hollywood Driver Puts Accent on Alacrity : Auto racing: Brown, 21, keeps an eye out for investors while staying focused on the road as he speeds over great tracks of Europe.

Zak Brown emerged from the wrestling pit at the Hollywood Tropicana, synthetic, made-for-grappling mud clinging to most of his body and a blonde clinging to the rest of it, her body also enveloped in the thick ooze.

The two of them exchanged small talk for a few moments, his voice heavily into the English of Great Britain and her voice heavily into the English of-- Oh my God! --the Valley.

She asked Brown if he was from, according to Brown, “England or somewhere.” He said he had lived in England for the past two years.

Brown, 21, of North Hollywood, may be the only young man born and raised in the Valley to speak with a British accent. More likely, he is the only one who has raced exquisite machines around some of the greatest auto tracks of Europe, collecting a string of successes.

And that accent.

“My friends here are merciless about it,” said Brown, back in the United States and living temporarily in the loft of his parents’ garage. “But it just happened. For two years I hardly saw any Americans. All my friends were British and from other European countries, and gradually I found myself pronouncing words differently.”

The racing success, however, was not as gradual. It has been a long, tough road marred by crashes, financial disasters and other assorted disappointments.

At the beginning, he slept in his car, awakening each morning in a position that was some horrible blend of the fetal position and the final stage of a really bad golf swing.

Things got worse. Last year began with a bang, literally. While testing a car at the Willow Springs Raceway near Palmdale before leaving for Europe, Brown spun and crashed, breaking an arm. The injury kept him out of racing for most of the year. He returned for a single British Lotus race.

This year, he finally broke through, getting a ride in the prestigious Dutch Opel Lotus circuit. He raced in more than a dozen events and finished in the top 10 in all but one race, including a fourth-place finish at Zandvoort, Holland, the highest finish for a rookie in the series.

And then the creditors came knocking. His team, Jeff Kendall’s Eagle Racing, folded under the pressure and Brown was left without a ride.

“I was sponsored by TWA and the team was sponsored by Barclay, the European cigarette company, but suddenly the team went bankrupt,” Brown said. “It was really depressing.”

His season was rescued a few weeks later when he negotiated with the creditors to allow him to race the cars in more Dutch Opel events. Without his mechanical crew and without proper financing, Brown raced on, grabbing two more top-10 finishes.

“But the cars hadn’t been maintained properly and we started having trouble with them,” Brown said.

He raced in a few events on the British Vauxhall Lotus series and ended his season Sunday at the Del Mar Grand Prix in the Saab Pro Series when his car went out on the first lap with mechanical problems.

Now, he sits in his small garage-top room, the telephone pressed hard to his ear as he tries to organize financing for what he hopes will be a climb next year to a higher level of racing, either the Atlantic series or the Indy Lights circuit.

“If not, I’ll return to Europe for another year,” Brown said. “But I really believe I can pull this off, that I can put the deal together for Atlantic or Indy Lights and race in America.”

What a novel idea.

Actually, his penchant for racing and winning began here at the age of 13 when he started racing go-karts. By 1990, at the age of 18, he had worked his way up to the Sprint Karts and in his first year at that level won the California Sprint Kart championship. Boosted by his success and with a small wave of financial backing, Brown moved at the end of that year to England and drove in the Formula Ford 1600 series. He won his first race on that circuit, and the climb into more powerful cars and more prestigious circuits has been a steady one ever since.

He said much of his success is due to his ability to put on a suit and tie and impress the right people--in racing circles those are folks with money who like the idea of their company’s name being painted in large letters on the side of a winning race car.

“At times it makes me feel like a sleaze,” Brown said. “Sometimes I find myself at a dinner with these people, looking at them, wondering who they are and whether or not they can help me. But I love that part of racing, making the deals.”

The part he really loves, though, is the part where his car is heading toward a concrete retaining wall at 165 miles an hour and he knows he’s going to keep the gas pedal pressed hard to the floor, no matter what happens.

“From the start, that was the thing,” said Brown, who attended Taft High and graduated from University High. “The speed. The adrenaline rush. There’s nothing to match it. Nothing.”

Not even a recent romp through the mud with a blonde beauty at a Hollywood nightclub as two of his European racing buddies, one from England and one from Sweden, watched with what Brown said were “really big eyes.”

And as Brown and blonde emerged from the mud and talked for a moment about Great Britain, she asked him what he did for a living.

He lied.

“I told her something, I don’t even remember,” he said. “For a moment I thought of telling her ‘I race $250,000 cars in England and Europe. I’m a professional auto racer.’ But I didn’t. A 21-year-old guy says a thing like that in a place like a Hollywood night club, and no one believes you anyway.”