The Great Race : The goal: 4,129 miles across 17 states in six days. Eating and sleeping on the move. Endless fatigue. Is it worth it? Oh, yes.

Living, went the message stitched inside the hat, is the only thing worth dying for.

I almost bought this No Fear baseball cap with its brown suede bill and Oscar Wilde homily. It seemed to bode well. It certainly spoke to the motoring marathon ahead and the exhilaration of personal risk and bodily damage attached to a mind-breaking ordeal: One Lap of America.

This year’s extreme game for those high of spirit, heavy of foot and rich with radar detectors was 4,129 miles across 17 states in six days and insomniac nights. From Dearborn, Mich., where Fords begin, west to Wisconsin and bear left to Tulsa, Okla. Hang another left to Atlanta, then north through Virginia and New York before a final dash across northern Ohio to suburban Detroit.

And along the way, every opportunity to damn the gendarmes, full speed ahead on 11 racing circuits from Atlanta Motor Speedway’s oval to the Formula One wriggles of Watkins Glen, N.Y.

In the spirit and slogan of the event, you run what you brung. As long as it was street legal.

In previous years that has meant stretch limousines and an ambulance containing attendants and a patient pregnant with pillows. Just in case state troopers dared to doubt the red lights, siren and apparent emergency purpose.

This month, the 85-vehicle assortment broke down to race cars and two faux police cars, sedans and a 1938 panel truck, vintage automobiles from both sides of the Atlantic, and muscle and sports cars from both rims of the Pacific.

Plus a fat, spongy Cadillac Eldorado brung by three guys from Oregon.

“This is certainly a motor-sports event for real cars and real drivers on real roads and race tracks,” says Brock Yates, curmudgeonly founding father of the event and editor-at-large of Car and Driver magazine, umbrella sponsor of One Lap. “But we also have this eclectic flavor of guys putting together teams around their old Corvette or a Dodge Dart.

“For these people, this is an opportunity to rub elbows with the greats of a pastime they are involved in. And to run with them on fabled racetracks.”

One Lap also is a clean parallel of big-city marathons where professional runners draw the sponsors and ESPN--but overall support and the fun of it all are provided by amateur puffers, wheelchair jocks, and jogging waiters balancing Dom Perignon.

So there were indeed big, growly dogs at the 1995 One Lap. Such as Daytona winner David Murry in a factory-sponsored Porsche 911 Turbo. And John Buffum, winner of a dozen rally championships, piloting a factory BMW M3 Lightweight.

Yet behind them, a diverse population of dentists, printing salesmen, hardware chain owners, opticians, fine arts students, chocolate manufacturers from Switzerland and an electronics whiz from Tokyo.

All were driving fools who cherish cars as vehicles of personal pleasure; who relish driving and would rather motor 1,000 miles a day than watch the World Series from behind home plate.

Consider those chocolatiers, the Swiss trio of Robert Dubler, Christian Schober and Mario Franco. Each year they call Detroit long distance and buy a car. This year it was an onyx Chevrolet Impala SS they would drive in One Lap before shipping it back to Geneva.

Mike Garrett of Poolesville, Md., entered a new Mustang and Linda Cheatham of Fairfax, Va., was at the wheel of a Ford Taurus SHO. Both have received kidney transplants. And both drove with their donors, using One Lap to promote organ transplants.

Politically and legally, however, One Lap wasn’t always this correct.

It was conceived in 1971 by a younger, rowdier Yates who decreed that a Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining Sea Memorial Dash was a perfect touch of rebellion for the times. Life was looser then. Fifty-five only meant middle age.

The ambulance was a legend of those early events. So was the 24-foot limo with an espresso machine, freezer, built-in bed and, yes, even the kitchen sink. Then there was the Porsche driver who collected nine speeding tickets in one state, didn’t finish the event and was never heard from again. He is believed still attached to a pickax and a chain gang.

Burt Reynolds made a movie of the madness and “Cannonball Run” became a cult classic. Among certain cults.

Cannonball was an illegal, tightly secretive, 3,000-mile road race from New York to California. The record was 32 hours earned in 1971 by race driver Dan Gurney. He ran a Ferrari across Arizona at 170 m.p.h.

“172 m.p.h.,” corrects Yates, co-driver at the time. But such pace, he quickly adds, was speeding the end of the event. “There was a hard edge developing and I knew if we kept on, we were going to hurt someone.”

The Cannonball died in 1978. It was resurrected three years later as One Lap of America, a socially responsible rally of 10,000 miles around the national perimeter. But this version attracted professional teams with their split-second mind-sets, small fortunes spent on calculators and computers, and zero tolerance for amateurs.

“It was tedious,” Yates growls. “One Lap was dominated by enthusiast rallyists with hired gun navigators. It was nuts. I ended up hating my own event.”

So he broadened the appeal by reducing rallying to fourth-grade math and Rand McNally reading levels. He shortened the distance to 4,000 miles, which decreased fatigue levels from comatose to simple exhaustion.

Yates introduced eight classes of competition to cover all categories of privately owned road vehicles from thinly camouflaged racing cars to luxury sedans. And he added speed events, typically timed laps at celebrated race tracks to restore “some of the flavor of the Cannonball, but on legal grounds.”

Now One Lap is grown up and respectable. Bridgestone Tires sponsored this month’s event with Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities its major benefactor.

Entrance fee was $2,000 per car. Driving would be night and day with one overnighter at the midpoint of the event. The test was of driving skills, focus and endurance of each two- or three-person team, and surviving six days on one shower.

“See it as spending seven days in a phone box,” Yates says.

With no wake-up calls.

*

Steve Beddor is a 35-year-old printing salesman from Chanhassen, Minn., who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t want smokers in his Porsche. Fine. I foreclosed my place in Marlboro Country a dozen years ago.

Beddor likes to eat fruit and drink mineral water. No problem. After the Northridge earthquake, I went two days on four bananas and a liter of Arrowhead.

Beddor’s depth of focus is directly related to the intensity demanded by his rock climbing, skiing, sky-diving, white-water rafting, blue water sailing and frozen water car racing on winter lakes. Well, I’ve been known to turn airplanes upside down, hike forbidden canyons, thrash catamarans and wrestle mean horses. Hell, I live in Los Angeles, where each day is a clammier sport than street luge with live grenades in your shorts.

With our action hero credentials established by telephone, we eventually shook hands over a Hyatt-Regency breakfast--yup, Beddor had his nose into cereal, fruit and yogurt--and decided we could survive each other, Sunday through Saturday cramped in a two-seater.

All rear-engined Porsches are cozy. Beddor’s Porsche fit tighter than O.J.’s gloves. Its competition seats were by Recaro and tightly tailored with minimal padding for skinnier butts.

Up front, where luggage and spare tire usually go, were tools, tarps and racing gas tanks. In back, where occasional seats are always placed, there was the spare tire, his and his duffel bags, pillows, blanket, a satchel of electronics gear, sponsors’ T-shirts and baseball caps, helmets and racing suits, and a two-day supply of apples and Starburst Fruit Chews. The lucky bunny got to ride on the dash.

All Porsches are fast. This one chews pavements and is an all-wheel drive Ruf Porsche Carrera, lightened and turbocharged to 450 horsepower by Louis Ruf of Germany.

Ruf even files rain gutters off the car to reduce drag and increase top speed. Which is 208 m.p.h.

The suspension is skateboard. It seemed a good idea to stay in contact with entries connected to kidney transplant groups.

At the driver’s meeting, Yates is Jerry Seinfeld.

“Somewhere in the middle of tomorrow night you will descend into paranoia and a state of insanity,” he says. “You will hate me and vow never to do this again.

“About law enforcement. Remember, we have no special privileges just because we are cunningly disguised as race cars. Make your presence unobtrusive.

“Highway patrols along the route have been notified that we are coming and will be watching. Plus pockets of local law enforcement who see us as an easy way of getting new parking meters without floating a bond issue.

“Good luck. Keep your cars on the black part.”

*

One hour before the Sunday night start, drivers feel the flutters of Charles Lindbergh before he left for Paris. Except Lindbergh didn’t have to travel as far.

A 1995 Oldsmobile Aurora is apart from the pack in a handicapped parking slot. It’s for real. Driver Fay Teal of Aston, Pa., drove nine One Laps until her multiple sclerosis worsened. Now she rides, husband David drives and they have much fun with the arrangement.

“David helps me with just about everything,” Fay says. “He’s seen the inside of the best ladies rooms in America.”

Jim Tignanelli of Fraser, Me., is squeegeeing the last bubble from decals around official-looking insignia on his 1994 Chevy Caprice police car. He can count the states that prohibit light bars on anything except emergency vehicles. He’s been ticketed in all of them.

There’s a 1981 DeLorean in the field.

There must be romance in the entry, maybe some personal passion at work or quiet sympathy for a defrocked John DeLorean.

“Nope,” says Gene Tufaro of Staten Island, N.Y. “It’s the only car I own.”

It was presumed that one spectator was wearing the only garment he owned. On this anxious evening, any sweat shirt would have been better than one stenciled: Worsham College of Mortuary Science.

*

Two hundred magnificent young persons in their driving machines are flagged into a dry Michigan night. With 4,129 miles ahead, there wasn’t much point in squealing starts.

Porsche’s factory car is off first. Then a Corvette. Then us. Eight cars back is another Ruf Porsche driven by another Beddor, Steve’s younger brother Dave.

With nine hours to cover 427 miles, clock and route book are really in command. Keep left to take Southfield Freeway. Exit right onto Interstate 94, ours until Milwaukee.

It is a long, dark, uninteresting haul with little to do but explore each other’s lives and beginnings, first and subsequent marriages.

Michigan is a dismal blob on a tedious interstate until the Indiana State Line. Little but sleeping shapes to see. Nothing to experience until crossing into Illinois and the smells of big city soot and unhappy tenements around Chicago.

We must be in Wisconsin by 6 a.m., unloading the Porsche at Road America near Elkhart Lake, Wis. We are 90 minutes early to the track. Beddor bundles himself in a tarp, rolls into dewy grass on a verge and prays nobody tries parking in the dark.

I sleep like a contortionist; arms and legs weaving around gearshift, steering wheel and spare tire. I will breakfast on Advil.

Dawn was pastel and damp with no coffee and no doubt Beddor will be driving Road America. He won rookie honors for last year’s One Lap. He knows this track. Besides, it’s his car.

Wise choice for me. On his maiden lap, the Porsche loses muscles and Beddor lurches into the pits. The engine compartment is an oil bath. Turbochargers are choking and we have a $210,000 corpse on our hands.

For the Beddors, it was the ultimate test of fraternal bonding. They walk with heads down. They talk with hands waving. David finally agrees. Steve has the best shot at a One Lap trophy and David will give us his Porsche.

We drive nonstop to Blackhawk Farms Raceway at Rockton, Ill., then Heartland Park near Topeka, Kan., knocking off 1,100 miles in just more than 24 hours.

We’ve already inherited seventh place from David Beddor.

At Blackhawk we improved to sixth overall and after Heartland Park had stepped firmly into fourth place. With three cars ahead of us, only two loomed large--Murry in the factory Porsche and a Corvette bristling with speed shop modifications.

Hallett Motor Racing Circuit in Oklahoma blurred into Memphis Motorsports Park in Tennessee. Where we slid into third place.

Morning mists at Atlanta Motor Speedway in Georgia gave way to sun-basted Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina, where the Corvette dropped out with bad plumbing. No fair looking happy about it, but we did. And locked up second position.

For long odysseys between race tracks, we managed to groove a fine cadence. When Beddor was bright at the wheel, I was snoozing. As he faded, I awoke refreshed. Gas stops and driver changes were mandated every two hours or 120 miles. If nature didn’t mandate first.

Each pause combined multiple chores; black coffee, fresh socks, washroom water in the face, a leg-stretching limp around the pumps, Murine eye-baths, microwave chili, Mylanta to kill the glop, check tire pressures, scrape bugs off the windshield, pack fresh bottles of Evian around the roll cage, climb in, buckle up and head out. Six minutes, tops.

Midnight meant little more than 300 miles of darkness ahead. Dawn simply returned bodies to solar power.

Fatigue becomes a mental illness. Speedometer readings change the harder you stare. In half-light, Beddor looks like a bulimic Arnold Schwarzenegger. People have been known to eat ChapStick and rub their lips with a tube of Tums.

And if this is Friday, this must be Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Also our Waterloo.

Maybe it was exhaustion. Could be that the lucky bunny had fallen asleep. Because on the final lap, Beddor flubbed a gear and shifted down, instead of up.

He went from fourth to third at around 120 m.p.h. The clutch gasped as it disintegrated.

So 3,500 miles into the event, owning second place, with one short day and two quick tracks to go, our only trophy was another dead Porsche.

One Lappers, of course, do not pause for their wounded.

We were left alongside the Porsche in an emptied, suddenly lonely meadow awaiting a flatbed and a rental car to carry us back to Detroit.

We spoke of the effort to get this far. We hugged in sympathy but chose not to look at each other. We knew what was in our eyes.

*

Even an aborted One Lap begs repeating because there’s a memorable, highly amusing America out there:

* There are still $20 motel rooms to be found, although their Magic Fingers may only have one hand.

* There are enough fireworks stores in the south to blow Georgia to Europe.

* It may be every American’s patriotic duty to visit Casey Jones’ Home, Billy the Kid’s Resting Place, John Wayne’s Birthplace, the Farm Machinery Hall of Fame, and Apple Annie’s Motel and Restaurant.

One Lap of America teaches new tricks for high speed, long distance motoring:

* If unsure of your location on some faceless interstate, check the first 10 license plates. If eight are from Iowa, that’s where you are.

* If there’s a toothpaste taste to your Evian, you’ve picked up the wrong water bottle.

* A Kit Kat can be sun-welded three times to a Hershey Bar and remain edible.

And as it is with surfers and endless summers, so One Lap is the driving enthusiast’s quest for the perfect track.

It could be Sebring. Or Laguna Seca. But somewhere, one year, she or he will find the circuit where those instincts have always belonged; a place where your lap times will be faster than the best because your mind owns this track.

There’s even a Zen to One Lap.

We found it at night on an empty Interstate 40 slicing Arkansas.

For no reason beyond fate, six competing cars linked presences on a dash toward tomorrow. A BMW sniffed a Nissan 300ZX. A Corvette circled our Porsche.

This band of lion cubs rollicked for 30 precious minutes, in a skilled, precise ballet. Each taking the lead for a while. Constantly dancing into a new position. Sometimes pulling alongside and hanging there, suspended, looking for the grin of another driver rejoicing this moment.

This, unquestionably, was living.

Maybe even worth dying for.

I will have to buy that hat.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The One Lap of America Route Sunday, June 11 1. Dearborn, Mich. Monday, June 12 2. Elkhart Lake, Wis 3. Rockton, Ill. 4. Des Moines, Iowa Tuesday, June 13 5. Topeka, Kan. 6. Kansas City, Kan. 7. Hallett, Okla. 8. Tulsa, Okla. Wednesday, June 14 9. Memphis, Tenn. 10. Nashville, Tenn. 11. Atlanta Thursday, June 15 11. Atlanta 12. Greenville, S.C. 13. Charlotte, N.C. Friday, June 16 14. Charles Town, W. Va. 15. Hazleton, Pa. 16. Watkins Glen, N.Y. 17. Wyoming, N.Y. 18. Buffalo, N.Y. Saturday, June 17 18. Southington, Ohio 19. Waterford, Mich. 20. Dearborn, Mich. Source: One Lap of America