At the Nürburgring, a regally dilapidated racetrack outside Cologne, Germany, the European Grand Prix was taking shape. Michael Schumacher, the seven-time Formula One champion, would soon be chasing Spain's Fernando Alonso, who had captured the pole. Starting well behind the leaders would be four cars driven by relatively inexperienced drivers. Two would crash during the first two laps of the race; the best would finish an ineffectual 11th. The only remarkable thing about these cars would be what was painted on the chassis, in bright red-and-white letters: "Red Bull."

But for Red Bull, the Austrian energy-drink company owned by the billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, winning at the Nürburgring was almost beside the point. With typically boundless enthusiasm, Red Bull was in Germany last spring to paper the racetrack with its brand. As you approached the track, young, apple-cheeked Red Bull women — of which the company appears to have an endless supply — seemed to materialize out of the forest. It wasn't even 9 a.m., but already they were wearing prepared smiles and asking, "Reg-u-lar or diet?"

In the paddock, the boulevard for drivers, team officials and untethered celebrities, Red Bull had made a statement in architecture. Not long ago, the Formula One paddock had been an unimpressive collection of tents and trailers — slapdash accommodations to while away the hours before the race. After Red Bull bought its first team from Jaguar in 2004, assuming annual operating expenses of reportedly more than $100 million, the company erected an "Energy Station," a gleaming, three-story, silver-and-blue headquarters resembling an Austrian disco. "In the beginning, you could see people standing in front of it, not knowing whether they could come in or not," said Thomas Hofmann, a Red Bull spokesman. Of course they could come in — Red Bull welcomed everyone! On this day, associates from Ferrari and Renault and the other top teams — teams that would overpower Red Bull's cars on the track that afternoon — were walking through the monogrammed glass doors to graze on a prerace feast of beef carpaccio with crayfish, baby sweet corn and Red Bull asparagus. Red Bull had even managed to brand the asparagus.

Young women stationed at the paddock gates waved copies of the Red Bulletin. Finding Formula One's mise-en-scène too aristocratic, Mateschitz had hired Norman Howell, a British newspaperman, to publish a muckraking daily magazine. Just as Howell was explaining Mateschitz's impish approach to Formula One — "He's taking the piss out of the sport because the sport is very up itself" — a half-dozen young German women (more women!) tottered by in short skirts and high heels. These were the Formula Unas, the winners of Red Bull's local "talent" competition, which is held in every city on the Formula One tour. Among other qualifications, a Red Bull spokeswoman explained, Unas had to be "very social, very motorsports oriented and very open-minded."

Inside the Energy Station, poring over race strategy, was Gerhard Berger, the co-owner of the second of Red Bull's two teams, Scuderia Toro Rosso, purchased from Minardi last year. Now in his 40's, Berger, an Austrian, was a former Formula One driver and one of the first of a singular breed you might call the Red Bull athlete. In 1987, Berger was approached by a tall, smiling fellow Austrian who said he had a proposal. Nearly 20 years later, Berger recalls that two things stood out about Dietrich Mateschitz: that he was unusually enthusiastic, and that he didn't have any money. Somehow, Mateschitz's charm offensive won the day. When Berger next appeared on Austrian television, he made sure he was filmed smiling and conspicuously drinking from a silver-and-blue can. Red Bull was born — as an energy drink and also as a sporting brand. "I never felt like I was sponsored by Red Bull," said Berger. Instead, he felt like he was immediately a part of the company, helping to "develop the brand."

Since Berger's fateful sip, Red Bull has grown into one of the most influential sports marketers on earth, spending more than $300 million annually. Lately, at Mateschitz's behest, Red Bull has begun reaching its tentacles deeper into America. To give its Formula One operation an American flourish, Red Bull had introduced a drivers' development program in 2002 that discovered the fortuitously named Scott Speed, the first Yankee that the European-dominated circuit had seen in 13 years. Then, in March, Mateschitz reportedly paid more than $100 million in a deal that gave him Major League Soccer's New York MetroStars — which, with customary élan, he renamed the New York Red Bulls. If investing in soccer and Formula One seems like a natural ambition for a European playboy, then Mateschitz is defying expectations by launching a Nascar team that will begin competing in 2007. And these new American ventures are merely a complement to Red Bull's presence in the unshaven quarters of the fringier sports, where Mateschitz has already branded a small army of triathletes, motocross champions, freestyle snowmobilers, BASE jumpers, ultramarathoners, aerobatic fliers and white-water kayakers.

For sure, Mateschitz wants his trademarked athletes to win. But as was clear at the Nürburgring, his grand strategy does not rely on something as unpredictable as race results. Mateschitz is trying to forge an unprecedented marriage between sports and selling: to make the athletes his pitchmen, selling product every time they kick a ball or shift into fifth gear. For Red Bull, sports is marketing, and marketing is sports — and the company won't stop until the two things are one. It happened in Europe, and it will happen in America.

And just what is Red Bull? It was discovered, if that's the word, in the early 80's by Mateschitz, who was visiting Asia as the marketing chief of a German cosmetics company. Its origins are Thai; the original name, "Krating Daeng," means red water buffalo. With the blessing of its founding family, with whom he formed a partnership that still exists, Mateschitz brought the drink to Salzburg, Austria. With a new name and a slightly rejiggered formula, it quickly moved into Switzerland, Germany and England. (French authorities snorted at the 80 milligrams of caffeine per can and banned it.)

Red Bull was not only a sports drink — a liquid so sugary it almost hurt going down — but a "philosophy." You only have to speak to Mateschitz's employees for a few minutes before they refer you to his optimistic message. Red Bull, they say, promotes an attitude of originality, nonconformism and dreamy reverie. If a Red Bull employee wants to learn to pilot a plane, Mateschitz says, he will pay for flying lessons so as to expand his or her horizons. As he sees it, "When you are called Red Bull, when you stimulate body and mind, when you give people wings, this has to do with sports, flying, with having been empowered to do whatever you want to."

For years, rumors abounded of Red Bull's "secret ingredient" (some maintained it was bull semen); that Red Bull was unduly habit forming and led to addiction; and that Red Bull contained illegal drugs. In fact, Red Bull consists largely of caffeine and sugar. Its only unusual ingredient is taurine, which the company trumpets, but which scientists say is an amino acid the body produces on its own.

In America, Red Bull controls about 70 percent of the energy-drink market it almost single-handedly created, and sold slightly more than one billion cans last year. So successful was Mateschitz's invasion that the company now finds its strategy copied by dozens of competitors: upstarts Rockstar and Monster, which also pepper their brand across extreme sports; PepsiCo's Mountain Dew, which sponsors snowboarder Shaun White, among others; and Coca-Cola's Full Throttle, which has dinged Red Bull in its commercials. "They're a classic category pioneer that's being circled by the sharks," says Terry Lefton, an editor-at-large at Sports Business Journal who follows the industry. And to keep his competitors at bay, Mateschitz will have to continue to plow money into American sports.

The happily schizophrenic nature of Red Bull's sports empire can be traced to the whims of Mateschitz, who has lived much of his life as an itinerant sportsman. In his youth, he played soccer. Then, during a decadent 10-year run as a student, he became a ski instructor. Mateschitz converted to snowboarding with the rest of Austria in the 1980's and did little else for years. Moreover, he told me, it was his "great dream" to have been a free climber, skittering up rock faces without a rope. Unfortunately, he struggled with being untethered to the earth. Now, as a 62-year-old billionaire, Mateschitz pilots the company's many planes (including one that belonged to the Yugoslavian dictator Marshal Tito), drives race cars and motorcycles, skis and snowboards.

Mateschitz styles himself as a gentleman adventurer, the kind who can call up world-class athletes and convince them to take him on an outing. The idea is that Mateschitz, who is a reasonably good athlete himself, will test his mettle against the professional. Four years ago, Heinz Kinigadner, the Austrian motocross champion, enlisted him to ride motorcycles into the Tunisian Sahara. "We were 150 miles from the next village and 100 miles from the next road," Kinigadner recalled recently. "And just when the sun was going down, Dietrich had a big crash. It took us until 3 in the morning to get him out of the desert." Mateschitz seemed unscathed, if unusually quiet, while sipping cappuccino the next morning. He hopped on a plane bound for Europe, and Kinigadner assumed everything was all right. A few days later, he heard from Mateschitz. "He called and said, 'Tomorrow morning, I'm having an operation,"' Kinigadner said. "I said, 'What?!' He said, 'My upper arm is broken and so is my shoulder."'

Despite such outré thrill-seeking, Mateschitz is almost painfully shy; a favorite mantra is "privacy is quality." (He once purchased an Austrian society magazine, which promptly stopped covering him.) When we met on a sunny afternoon this spring at Hangar-7, a domed hangar-turned-museum for his various aircraft outside Salzburg, Mateschitz appeared wearing a black blazer, dark jeans and a nervous smile. I asked him if he had entertained visions of becoming a professional athlete himself. "I'm not passionate enough, you know?" he said. "For example, when we learned windsurfing 20 years ago, there were friends of mine who practiced hours and hours and hours. And as soon as I could manage a strong wind it was good enough. This is true for almost everything I do. I do it not to be really good but just to do it and to have fun."

This is an unusually modest self-assessment, but it nicely illustrates Mateschitz's approach to sports. As the display at the Nürburgring showed, Red Bull's marketing machine is vast and unflinchingly professional. But underlying the omnipresent Red Bull logos is a notion that sports should be unbound from the shackles that hinder a fan's enjoyment — greedy owners, bureaucrats, expensive tickets. In the case of Formula One, Mateschitz argues that before he bought in, the sport had been reduced to "BMW against Mercedes and Honda against Toyota," and that fans could no longer appreciate its natural beauty.

With the notable exception of Gerhard Berger, the original Red Bull athletes were outdoorsmen. "In the past, we had no team sports — only the free climbers, the white-water, the snowboarders of the world," Mateschitz says. It was thought that these action-sports stars — operating on the margins of, or in opposition to, the sporting mainstream — would best embody the Red Bull philosophy. Mateschitz gave the athletes modest amounts of money, often only a few thousand dollars per year, and asked them to wear Red Bull T-shirts or helmets when they competed. In turn, the athletes, many of whom had never known sponsorship or celebrity, became enthusiastic evangelists for the drink. Today, Red Bull has more than 100 Americans among its 800 worldwide athletes in an encyclopedia of disciplines. Prominent among them are Daron Rahlves, the alpine skier; Travis Pastrana, the high-flying freestyle motocross star; Tao Berman, the kayaker; Ryan Sheckler, the skateboarder; Nicky Hayden, the MotoGP motorcycle champion; and Shane McConkey, the free skier.

McConkey, who once proclaimed himself "the most stoked human being to ever have lived," is a representative specimen. In the early 90's, he was one of a few hundred anonymous skiers competing in what was then called extreme skiing, a discipline that took you off manicured ski slopes and into far more precarious descents. In 1996, McConkey took first prize in a Red Bull-sponsored competition called Snow Thrill, and after the race, a rep from Austria asked if he wanted to become a Red Bull athlete. "I was excited to promote them because there weren't many companies supporting the kind of skiing we were trying to push on the world," McConkey says. Given a helmet emblazoned with a Red Bull logo and some modest funding, McConkey was left to pursue his sporting passions. Lately, that has meant joining free skiing (as extreme skiing is now known) with his other favorite sport, BASE jumping (basically, parachuting from a fixed object, like a building or a bridge). The new hybrid, sometimes called skiBASEing, has McConkey strapping on a parachute and skiing off the edge of a cliff at 60 m.p.h. For this McConkey receives several thousand dollars a year and Red Bull's enthusiastic blessing. "How many companies in the world would even consider supporting BASE jumping?" he told me. "It's crazy. There's too much liability. And Red Bull's just like, 'So?"'

McConkey's was a typical Red Bull sponsorship. He needed Mateschitz's money, and Mateschitz needed his brand to absorb some of McConkey's stubbly authenticity. Mateschitz repeated the transaction a few hundred times in dozens of different sports. These days, the 800 Red Bull athletes are the sporting version of Red Bull's more conventional under-the-radar marketers, who pass out the drink in clubs and on college campuses — part of a practice the columnist Rob Walker has dubbed "murketing." Since Red Bull does very little advertising, Mateschitz hopes these "sportsmen opinion-leaders," as he calls them, can win over a young audience — one that sees the Red Bull logo on Shane McConkey's rapidly descending parachute and thinks, "I want to drink what he's drinking."

This is worth pausing over, because what Mateschitz is attempting is a new kind of sports sponsorship, one that is all-consuming. When Michael Jordan pitches Nike basketball shoes, you can still carve out a thin piece of real estate between Jordan the ex-basketball player, who won six N.B.A. championship rings, and Jordan the Nike pitchman, who is currently hawking the 21st iteration of the Air Jordan sneakers. This intellectual space doesn't exist with Red Bull athletes. "We have no spokesmen," says Mateschitz, by which he means Red Bull has no spokespeople paid to proselytize on behalf of the drink, nor does the company use the athletes in advertisements. (Red Bull's only advertising campaign in the United States is a series of crudely drawn and weirdly disturbing TV commercials.) In fact, all the Red Bull athletes are spokesmen, selling the product through their performance. According to Mateschitz, when Shane McConkey leaps off a snow-covered mountain, he is cultivating Red Bull's image: its originality and derring-do and carefree cool. Red Bull gives its sportsmen opinion-leaders no talking points, no memorable catchphrases to shriek as they dive off the mountainside. They're expected only to be their daffy selves, which, in turn, promotes the drink's daffiness. When I called McConkey at his home in Lake Tahoe, he was as happy to talk about skiing Vail's Look Ma run in the nude as he was about his Red Bull sponsorship.

The final part of Red Bull's marketing strategy is its almost comic insistence on styling its product as a performance-enhancing sports drink. Most sports drinks repeat a slightly less ebullient version of this fiction. But in Red Bull's case, it is key to the product. Shane McConkey BASE jumping off 4,000-foot cliffs on Baffin Island? He was powered by Red Bull. Felix Baumgartner, another sponsored athlete, gliding on carbon composite wings across the English Channel? Also Red Bull. To assist with his own endurance and concentration, Mateschitz says, he drinks more than a dozen cans of Red Bull per day, though a few years ago, weight gain forced him to switch to diet.

Sponsoring free skiers is a relatively low-risk proposition (except for the skier). But to fend off competitors in America, Mateschitz figured that he was going to have to invest in the previously verboten realm of team sports. Red Bull's team-sports initiatives up to then had been fairly modest: soccer and ice hockey clubs in Salzburg, and the two very expensive Formula One teams. Red Bull's reticence was a matter of image. If a Red Bull-sponsored wakeboarder was off his game, practically no one would notice. But if a Red Bull-owned team was flailing at the bottom of the standings, the company would be forced to endure the humiliations that other sports owners do: the media scrutiny, the howl of angry fans, the blow to their image. Mateschitz has often worried that if a team called the Red Bulls is losing, then people will naturally assume that the drink is bunk.

Mateschitz, then, would not be the typically detached team sponsor with a sign in the left-field bleachers or a logo on the chassis of a Formula One car. "We are not Marlboro, who goes to Ferrari and gives them a check every year and that's it," he told me. He would insist on something never before seen: full ownership. And any team he owned would undergo a process he cheerfully calls "relaunching." This meant that the team would be rebranded, in toto, as the Red Bulls. When Mateschitz purchased Salzburg's 72-year-old soccer club, SV Wüstenrot, in April 2005, the company reportedly declared that the team had "no history." Despite the protests of its supporters, Wüstenrot became Red Bull Salzburg.

Relaunching is not a strategy that works with, say, the National Football League. So Mateschitz took his money elsewhere: Nascar, which has a long history of wealthy patrons, and Major League Soccer, which needs all the wealthy patrons it can get. "Soccer is by far the most important sport in the world," Mateschitz said in Salzburg. "So when you are a global company, you hardly can ignore it anymore. Because of the World Cup this year, we said if we ever want to be involved in soccer, now is the right time to do so."

In March, Mateschitz bought the New York franchise from the mogul Philip Anschutz's company AEG. With his New York soccer experiment, Mateschitz is quick to point out that he has studied both the failures of American soccer and its lone blissful moment, the white-hot late-1970's run of the New York Cosmos. During the Cosmos' heyday, the team was the toast of New York, with Robert Redford and Mick Jagger dropping by the locker room to pay obeisance to Pelé and the other Cosmos stars. (Pelé appeared at the Red Bulls' home opener in April to bless the new team.)

But Mateschitz knows glamour will only take you so far. "The New York Cosmos — they had everything," he told me. "But it didn't help soccer." Indeed, without a durable fan base or a solvent league, the Cosmos were reduced to a barnstorming squad by 1984, and both league and team flamed out the next year. Mateschitz has made all the usual noises about incubating soccer in America, pledging to sponsor a national youth league and build at least 100 new street-soccer courts in the United States in the next few years. And he insists that he and his associates will need at least two or three years to raise the Red Bulls' profile to the point where the league can secure a better television contract. (This year, Major League Soccer signed an eight-year deal with ESPN that was unheard-of for an American soccer league.) But as his Formula One history showed, Mateschitz was also not above the bold marketing ploy. Last spring, he reportedly offered a 10-year, $120 million contract to the Brazilian star forward Ronaldo. (Red Bull acknowledges only a meeting.) Rumors have also surfaced of talks with the European stars David Beckham and Zinédine Zidane. In September, the team broke ground on a new $200 million soccer stadium in Harrison, N.J., which would seat 25,000 fans and move the Red Bulls out of cavernous Giants Stadium.

Meanwhile, Red Bull's Nascar plans remain a greater crapshoot. Red Bull has established bona fides with American motorsports, including the MotoGP circuit (basically, the Formula One of motorcycle racing), where it sponsors driver Nicky Hayden and puts on an annual race at Laguna Seca; a brief venture in the struggling Indy Racing League; and ownership of the Formula One teams, which bring the Energy Station and the Formula Unas to Indianapolis once a year. In January, Mateschitz hired Marty Gaunt, a veteran of the vaunted Penske Racing operation (a powerhouse in both Indy and Nascar), to manage his operations. When Gaunt met with Mateschitz in Salzburg, he found the billionaire wistfully cradling his motorcycle helmet and speaking of grandiose ambitions. By the fall, Gaunt himself was evangelizing the Red Bull philosophy, repeating Mateschitz's heroic charge to "do something impossible."

Red Bull would become the first Nascar owner that was also the team's sponsor. While other team owners would feud with their sponsors, Red Bull would present a single opinion on everyone from the driver to the woman hawking Team Red Bull T-shirts at the souvenir stand. "It's one phone call," Gaunt said. Moreover, as part of what it boasts is the "globalization" of the circuit, Team Red Bull (along with two other teams) will also be driving Toyotas, the first-ever foreign cars allowed in Nascar's Nextel Cup.

By the fall, however, it seemed that Red Bull's vision of total control ended at the doors of the garage. The company was confronting something that even its relentless enthusiasm could not overcome: Nascar bureaucrats. Where Formula One bends to wealthy "privateers" who own the teams, Nascar is more populist, amenable to the plaints of its track owners and R.V.-driving fans. Plans to build a traveling Energy Station were scrapped when several tracks told Red Bull they didn't have the space or had already committed to exclusive deals with other sports drinks. Nor would there be Red Bulletin magazine or Formula Unas. "We're pouring all our money into the car," says Gaunt, which means that if Red Bull is to make a splash in Nascar, the cars will have to be awfully good. With Brian Vickers, a 23-year-old former Busch Series champion and a Nextel Cup veteran, driving car No. 83 (a coy reference to the 8.3 fluid ounces per can of Red Bull), the team, Gaunt said, has set its sights on finishing in the top 20 in its first year, and hopes to move into the top 10 by its third. "We'll never be satisfied running 20th," Gaunt told me. "Our long-term goal is winning races."

When I asked Gaunt what visible impact Red Bull would have on Nascar, he paused for a moment. He finally said it would probably be the look of the car. As both sponsor and team owner, Red Bull wouldn't have to sell off the fender, spoiler and hood. Its Toyotas would be "real clean," Gaunt boasted, with no clutter. Just one giant can of Red Bull, whirling around Daytona at 200 miles per hour.

It's easy to smirk at Red Bull's enthusiasm. For sure, every piece of its sports empire is geared toward selling Red Bull. ("Everything we do is about marketing," Mateschitz has been known to say.) Yet somehow this is not quite as off-putting as one might expect. Last spring, I took in a Red Bull air race on the coast near Barcelona. It was a marketing extravaganza, with spokeswomen passing out drinks, an announcer imported from a local radio station screaming the company's name every few seconds and a bright, gleaming Energy Station planted on the beach. At the same time, Red Bull had enlisted some of the very best aerobatic fliers in the world — including the American Kirby Chambliss, himself a Red Bull athlete — to carve impossibly crazy signatures across the sky. Hundreds of thousands of curious Barcelonans looked on with uncomprehending pleasure as planes swooped between Red Bull-logo gates that had been moored to rafts in the sea. No one understood the scoring system, but no one much cared, either. They were seeing flying as it had rarely been seen since the early days of aviation, and the omnipresent Red Bull logos made it no less beautiful.

Moreover, there's something authentic about Mateschitz's professed love of adrenaline for its own sake. After I spoke to him in Salzburg, he summoned one of the company's exhibition pilots, a gnomish, white-haired man named Sigrid Angerer, to take me up in a Red Bull-logoed jet and turn barrel rolls over the Austrian Alps. I shrieked, while Angerer projected Austrian coolness. The following morning, one of Mateschitz's assistants, Christina Sponer, called me in Salzburg to say she would like to take me to see Red Bull's new "diagnostics center" in the nearby town of Thalgau. Would it be O.K., Sponer asked, if we were to make the trip on her motorcycle? She arrived wearing a leather jacket and black driving gloves, and handed me a helmet from her paragliding gear, which she uses on weekends.

With me clutching at her waist, we raced through the chilly Austrian countryside, past farmhouses and cows and over hills covered in pine trees. When we reached the diagnostics center, Sponer and I walked inside and, not having had any major injections of caffeine since breakfast, grabbed two cans of Red Bull from the refrigerator.

If Mateschitz is to be a team owner and sponsor who shells out millions for athletes, then with the diagnostics center he is determined to be a trainer, too. The center is a destination point for Red Bull athletes, where the staff of doctors can experiment on them as if they are tweaking a new drink formula. The New York Red Bulls, who could use an injection of caffeine, should probably visit soon.

The head of the diagnostics center is an excitable German doctor named Bernd Pansold, who spoke in a fast, broken English. When I mentioned the American teams, he said, "We are no more sponsor, we are owner!"

Two Red Bull surfers limped past us in Red Bull-logo shorts. Pansold led us through enormous weight rooms and medical stations recently occupied by Red Bull's Salzburg soccer team. At the moment, the center's psychological wing, on the second floor, contained two Red Bull hockey players sitting listlessly in front of a computer screen, taking a personality test. Most Red Bull athletes commit to staying in the diagnostics center for at least three days, allowing Pansold and his staff to compile a thick binder of their vital statistics — to help them train better or just to monitor their performance.

"The New York Red Bulls will come here," he said. "It's very clear that soccer players should win together." Clutching a sugar-free Red Bull, he continued in a singsong of German and English, chattering about how high the stakes were, how Red Bull would never be satisfied with its athletes finishing 40th in the Olympics.

I had lost his train of thought and turned helplessly to Sponer. She said: "Mr. Mateschitz likes to say, 'If an insurance company sponsors a team, and the team loses, people don't change their insurance company. But when the Red Bulls lose, people get a new drink."'

Bryan Curtis is a staff writer at Slate. He wrote about Ohio State's Troy Smith in Play's September issue.

To the uninitiated or the uninformed, Bia Figueiredo might seem like a very bad driver. She zigs and zags through the clogged, smoggy streets of São Paulo - either in her jet-black Honda FIT or her mother's Chevy Corsa, depending on which car's license plate number allows her to beat the air pollution controls and drive legally that day. She downshifts, she upshifts, she tailgates like there's no tomorrow. She passes on the left, passes on the right, ignores various white stripes designating this or that lane and, at particularly tense times, talks about having me open the passenger door to stop the motorcyclists who zoom past between paralyzed cars. "Why don't we try?" she asks, her eyes merry but her lightly accented English tight. The only thing that seems to be keeping Bia's behavior in check, in fact, is that she is just two tickets away from losing her driver's license. "This is the traffic," she says dolefully. "I hate it. I hate it so much."

At this moment she looks and sounds like any other pretty, pouty 21-year-old child of São Paulo prosperity, her long brown hair flawlessly highlighted, her skin unlined, unfreckled and a pale, perfect pink. Her robust figure, today as most days, is clad courtesy of Puma, one of her sponsors: form-fitting T-shirt, form-fitting workout pants, shoes and bag, all color-coordinated in black, white and apple green. Her CD player flits from Shakira to Shania Twain, and her cellphone twitters frequently, but she remains oblivious, focused on the road, looking for an opening, anything that might give her a small advantage in this stultifying daily ritual. This deep concentration I recognize as what she referenced earlier, without a trace of irony, as her "animal instincts."

"I am so sad about it — the traffic," she says, shaking her head. "The drivers just don't go, O.K.? Drivers in São Paulo get used to the traffic and they just don't go."

Not going isn't Bia's problem. Ana Beatriz Figueiredo (pronounced Fee-gay-REE-do, though in Brazil she's just getting famous enough to be known by her nickname, like Pelé or Ronaldinho) is currently on a mission to become not merely the most successful female Formula One driver but the first female Formula One world champion. In the process, she hopes to bring back the era of great Brazilian drivers that ended with the fiery and martyr-like death of the greatest of all, Ayrton Senna, on an Italian racetrack in 1994. Among its participants and fans, Formula One — or Grand Prix racing, as it is also known — is considered the fastest, most difficult and most technologically sophisticated of all motor sports. This is not stock-car racing, or drag-racing, or even Indy. The engineering marvels that are Formula One cars are painstakingly built and can cost in the millions. The track is not the conventional oval that many associate with car racing, but a winding, varied course; in Monaco, it runs through city streets.

So far, Bia has done well, advancing through the various levels of car racing with something that looks like ease. She was named Rookie of the Year for the Brazilian Formula Renault series in 2003, and in 2005 became the first woman to win a Formula Renault race in South America. (In Formula Renault, the cars are not custom-made as they are in Formula One, and reach top speeds of about 150 miles per hour. Formula One cars can hit 200 m.p.h. and higher.) In 2006 she moved up to the faster cars of Formula Three, which reach speeds of 170 m.p.h., and she is currently ranked fourth in South America in that category. Bia's fans have set up an adoring Web site, which is available in both Portuguese and English (www.torcidabiafigueiredo.com.br). She has major sponsors — not just Puma, but guy-guy companies, like Bardhal, which makes auto products — and has been compared favorably with Danica Patrick, who finished fourth at Indy last year and is the first woman ever to have led that race. Currently, Bia's manager is negotiating her next step, a spot on a European Formula Three team, bringing her ever closer to what she calls, with equal parts modesty and ferocity, "my objective."

Back in traffic, Bia shifts into neutral and stews. She reacts to this poky, exhaust-laden morass the way a great author might respond to the first pages of a hack novel, or a fine painter to a landscape on black velvet: it's a deeply personal affront. She falls uncharacteristically silent and then takes a sharp, fed-up breath. Glimpsing an opening, Bia stomps on the accelerator, flying onto the shoulder just long enough to get a G-force jolt before pulling into traffic again. No one, it seems, is in a bigger hurry than she is.

For those of you who have not brushed up on your Brazilian history recently, São Paulo is one of the biggest cities in the world and, not coincidentally, is the center of Brazil's auto industry as well as its auto racing. That São Paulo is a city of strivers is obvious not just from its tony restaurant culture but from its aggressive skyline and carefree pollution. From Bia's descriptions of the rich in Brazil and from stories that described her as middle class, I somehow imagined that she had come from a family of high school teachers or sales clerks, a notion I am quickly disabused of when she takes me to her home.

On the way there, the road begins to open up, and she does too. Bia has a laugh that is deliriously gay, and she has that Brazilian warmth that is like the morning sun — sweet and soft. She has a way of saying "Yes" in response to queries that is simultaneously definitive and encouraging. She is pretty, but in a Katie Holmes way, not a Nicole Kidman way, which means she is approachable. And she is not at all — or not yet — jaded. Listening to Nelly Furtado's latest hit, she asks what the word "promiscuous" means, and looks a little squeamish at the answer, and when I tell her why "condoms" is not the best shortened form of "condominiums," she looks abashed.

We speed past clumps of luxury high-rises adjacent to the infamous Brazilian slums known as favelas. As the city falls away, more favelas squat between gated communities, one of which is Bia's. The neighborhood looks like a jungle version of Bel Air, with large, well-landscaped homes twining up a hill paved with brick streets. The Figueiredo house is a whitewashed, two-story contemporary with a balcony overlooking an expansive swimming pool. A uniformed servant is in attendance. Bia's father is a noted psychiatrist with a specialty in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and her mother is an oral surgeon. In other words, if soccer is the game of the masses in Brazil, auto racing remains, as always, the province of the wealthy and sophisticated. Since Henry Ford built a plant in Brazil in the 1920's, the car has been synonymous with the country's global ambitions. Brazilian Grand Prix champions showed the world that their country could compete on an international scale, not just by winning races but also by handling cars that were so technologically advanced.

The most renowned Brazilian driver was the handsome, charismatic Senna, who, 12 years after his death, still holds the third-highest number of victories in Formula One history. Senna possessed not only great courage but also tremendous grace and style, qualities that are revered by his countrymen and that he displayed both on and off the track. The loss of Senna still haunts Brazil, most particularly São Paulo, and the hopeful, nostalgic search for a replacement continues to this day. It is therefore not surprising that Bia keeps a photo of Senna tucked under the glass of her bedside table, and that her fervent fan club sees in her the stirrings of opportunity. As the site's founders, Larissa and Cinthia Leite, wrote me giddily in an e-mail: "We met Bia 2004, May, 10 years after that sad May of 1994 and Bia was in #10 car. We felt something unique coming from that car, a wish to do the best, to go beyond of limits. ... Like something wished tell us ... that feeling ... is back!"

That feeling certainly dominates the Figueiredo household. "Our life now is racing," Bia's mother, Marcia, says with a shrug, though she doesn't frequent the races. ("She'd make everyone too nervous," cracks Bia's older sister, Ana Luiza, who also lives at home.) Marcia is warm, with a crinkly, eager smile. Bia's father, Jorge, is the somber one, his sense of humor best described as parched. When I ask what school of psychiatry he favors, he fixes me with a level gaze and answers, "Jorge Figueiredo." But when he has the chance to talk about Bia's accomplishments he becomes more animated.

The Figueiredos raised their girls the modern way: both went to exclusive schools, both studied English in the United States as exchange students, both were raised, in the great democratic tradition, to believe they could be anything and anyone they wanted to be. Today, there are plenty of pictures around the house of Ana Luiza — "the intellectual," according to Bia — and her parents are clearly happy with her ebullient beauty, her success in her chosen career (tourism) and the boyfriend who, baseball cap reversed on his head, seems to have become part of the family. On the other hand, Jorge has at least 12 photo albums devoted to his younger daughter. Showing me shots of Bia's victories, Jorge points out that she refused to accept her trophies from bikini-clad babes, like the boys, but instead asked a family friend to do the honors.

The Figueiredos also have the video equivalent of a highlight reel, which we watch from a plush, burnt-orange couch in which all the seats recline. We see Bia as a child, racing around in her hot-pink go-kart at upwards of 60 m.p.h. As she grows, she progresses to bigger, faster rockets on wheels. Older Bia watches appraisingly as younger Bia speeds around the tracks, blocking off drivers, overtaking them and even crashing. (We all observe calmly as, on-screen, her demolished car is lifted by crane onto the back of an 18-wheeler after Bia hit a wall and spun out. When I ask whether she had been frightened, she shakes her head dismissively.)

The most instructive clips, however, are Bia's post-race interviews from when she was 8 or so. She told me that she was shy when she spoke to the inevitably bemused local TV reporters, but in fact she seems remarkably self-possessed. Her fingernails are already black with grease, and she seldom displays a child's eager smile or willingness to please. Instead, she thinks about her answers carefully before giving them up:

Was she scared of crashing? "No."

Did she play with dolls? "Yes."

Did she have a boyfriend? Of course not.

Asked about Senna's death, Bia bows her head and seems, just for a moment, to leave the premises. She finally responds somberly, which causes her sister, translating from the couch, to erupt with laughter. "She says, 'Life goes on,"' Ana Luiza explains, and it is sort of a crackup, watching this child wax wise, though her father has told me that the only time he has seen Bia cry was, in fact, when Senna died.

What does Bia think about when racing?, the reporter on-screen persists. The little girl looks at him steadily. "You can't step on the brake," she says. "You have to go on."

"Bia grew up at Interlagos," her mother tells me, and this is not an understatement. The fabled racetrack, located between two reservoirs on what was once the outskirts of town, now sits surrounded by a large favela. Bia takes me in through a back entrance, near a newsstand crammed with racing magazines that carry news of the announced retirement of seven-time Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher. We stand in a sun-bleached parking lot between what are actually two courses. To our right is the sprawling track officially known, since 1985, as the José Carlos Pace Autodrome, named for the Brazilian Formula One driver who died in a plane crash. Aficionados still call the place by its old name, however, which dates back to when the track opened in the 1940's. Next door is the far smaller go-kart track named after Ayrton Senna, where Bia demanded to be taken at age 6. (Her father made her wait until she was 7 before she could get behind the wheel.) "This is where I started," she says. It is worth noting that the go-kart track here — or "go-go kart," as Bia calls it, with typical acceleration — is nothing like the homey, litigation-proof sites rented for kiddie parties in the United States. Instead, it is a fast, grueling training ground for racecar drivers, or pilots, as they are more aptly called. All the Brazilian champions got their start in karting, which partly explains Bia's early attraction to the place. She loved the speed, the noise and the crashes, but she also knew, from a young age, that to accomplish her goal of becoming a Formula One driver she would first have to master this miniature version of the sport.

Bia strides to a nondescript building between the track and the street and raps on a heavy metal door. It is opened by an inordinately fit older man with a haunting, gleaming smile. Naylor Borigis de Campos, who goes by the name Nô, is one of the most famous kart trainers in Brazil, known for his uncanny ability to spot and nurture talent. He has worked with many of the country's best drivers, even loosely with Senna, whose picture appears among those of Bia and many others lining his office walls. A collection of brightly colored helmets — gifts from grateful drivers — graces another wall. Sitting down on a weary black leather couch, Nô grins and takes a faded Brazilian identification card out of his wallet and shows it to me: it is Bia at 8, her tiny thumbprint and name in perfect script beneath her picture. Nô has carried this card with him for the last 11 years.

It is entirely likely that much of Bia's career would not have happened without Nô, and that his, too, would have ended long ago without her. Their intertwined stories make for one that the Lifetime network might reject as too implausible: when Nô was the age of Bia in her ID photo, he came to São Paulo from Bahia with his desperately impoverished family, which included nine siblings. Opportunity in São Paulo proved to be scarce, however, and the family left. But Nô chose to stay on, cleaning public bathrooms by day and sleeping in them at night. School was out of the question — he hasn't had any formal education — but he had a gift for mechanical things, and eventually taught himself to work on cars. Like many from the favelas, he was drawn to Interlagos.

Then, in 1995, one of Nô's protégés, a gifted driver named Marco Campos, died in a racing accident in France. Nô had also recently lost his wife and, deeply depressed, was thinking of giving up his career entirely. But one day — cue the music — he saw a dark-haired, determined little girl racing around the go-kart track. (Nô had already tried to train a few other girls, with no success.) "When he saw me," Bia says, translating from Nô's heart-tapping, hand-clasping, heaven-peering Portuguese monologue, "he thought, 'It's her.' He had energy again. He thought he could start again."

Nô guided Bia toward a fifth-place finish in the Brazilian karting championship when she was 10, and over the next few years, she almost always ranked in the top five in that event. At 16 Bia graduated to Formula A (a faster kart on a faster track for older kids) and for two years running won the Gold Helmet Award for the Best Brazilian Kart Driver. (She was also, incidentally, the first female to win Formula A races in Brazil.) In 2003 she came in second in the Petrobras Kart Selective, a prestigious South American competition.

What Nô has done for Bia is both tangible and intangible. Yes, he is her mentor. Yes, he found the right man to repair the engines on her cars, and, yes, he drew upon his myriad contacts to find her the right manager (the well-known and well-regarded former racer André Ribeiro) and the right racing team (Cesário Fórmula, owned by Augusto Cesário, also a former racer). But Nô also makes sure, on a daily basis, that Bia faces the world — their chosen, shared world — with resolve and focus. Over time, he has grafted his natural asceticism onto Bia's instinctive determination: "You have to focus 95 percent on racing, 3 percent on school and 2 percent on family," he has told her.

It's obvious that this collaboration makes a statement that transcends racing. It is nothing new in Brazil that the drivers are white and privileged, while those who work in the pit have darker skin and started with little, if anything. It's one of the few ways for people of limited means to escape Brazil's pervasive poverty. But in this case, an older man (Nô is 57) and a younger woman work together as equals, something that has not always been easy for Brazilians to accept. That Nô loves Bia like a daughter is clear — he keeps her generous gifts and old uniforms locked away in his luxury high-rise — and it is hard not to wonder what might happen to him when and if the time comes for them to part. That time may not be so far away, given that Bia's manager thinks she should move next year to a European Formula Three team, possibly Cesário's British squad, the next step on her path to Formula One. "All these manufacturers have a specific plan for young drivers," Ribeiro tells me, and those plans don't necessarily include a go-kart guru, no matter how gifted he is.

The next day, Bia and Nô take me to the place she calls "the Team,² a gigantic auto mart on the outskirts of town where, in a sprawling garage, the car she races for Cesário Fórmula is housed. The place smells thickly of oil and is as spotless as a surgical ward. About half a dozen cars are parked inside, each worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, painted bright primary colors and stickered with sponsors' logos. They look malevolent — long and narrow, needle-nosed with just a sliver of a windshield — and settling into the driver's seat is not unlike nestling into a coffin. The steering wheel is about the size of a salad plate, and there are two tiny sideview mirrors with which to scan for gaining cars. On what would be the left door of Bia's car (if there were a door) is pasted a small map of the first track she will race in the upcoming fall season. It's color-coded to show her the best places to accelerate, slow down and take a curve. Bia has already begun to study her strategy, even though this race, in Buenos Aires, is still about two months away. She will also eventually walk the track, committing trouble spots to memory so that her moves during competition will be almost automatic. Just before the race, she, like all competitors, will be allowed two runs that will establish her starting position.

Even when she isn't staring down a race date, Bia works out almost daily with her longtime trainer, Fernando Conceição. Racing is one of the few sports where the strength difference between men and women is not really a factor in determining victory. Still, Bia needs endurance to withstand the G-forces of driving 40 minutes straight in a Formula Three race, and she needs to keep her arms, neck and shoulders strong to avoid the tendinitis that can develop from steering and shifting. Otherwise, it's pretty much reflexes, strategic ability and mind-set that will determine the difference between victory and defeat — assuming, of course, that the pit crew and car do their part, too.

There are currently two drivers each on Cesário's South American Formula Renault and Formula Three teams, and a staff of about 16 engineers and mechanics. (The men's room at the garage is, understandably, much bigger than the ladies' since the only other female I see working here is a secretary.) They all wear spotless Cesário Fórmula T-shirts and jeans, and some of them are handsome enough to be featured in a "Boys of Interlagos" calendar. Bia doesn't socialize with the other drivers — "There's a lot of jealousy, so it's hard," she says. Instead, the crew serves as her office colleagues. One of them, clowning around, snaps the black steering wheel cover from Bia's car and wears it on his head like a shower cap.

When Bia steps into her yellow-and-black racing uniform, with its fireproof quilting and sponsor patches (Bardhal, Puma, Samsung and others), nobody is tempted to whistle. "No one knows what sex you are when you are in uniform," she has said, and she's right. She looks like a slightly more feminine version of the Michelin Man, her buoyant walk subdued by all the padding into a slew-footed waddle. At her waist Bia wears a belt with "A+" embroidered next to her name. I think it's a ranking and then realize it's her blood type. In case of fire, she tells me, she has exactly five seconds to get out of her car.

Nô watches Bia's transformation from a distance, arms folded, a slight look of anxiety clouding his face. "Should I stick with her?" he asks me, out of the blue, resuming another round of heartfelt pantomime. "What do you think? Would that be the right thing to do?"

I shake my head and ask him to repeat the question.

"'Yes.' You should say, 'Yes,"' one of the mechanics interjects.

Nô, it seems, is already preparing himself and Bia for the next stage of her career, whichever way it goes.

In both the Brazilian and European press, most of the stories focus on Bia's difficulties as a woman in a man's game. She is constantly asked whether she thinks men are stronger, smarter and faster, and even at this early stage in her career, she has her stock answers. (They would be "No," "No" and "No," sometimes with the added comment that she wants to "thump the next guy" as much as anyone.) It's also true that every man racing against Bia wants to thump her. "They cannot accept losing to a girl," her manager, André Ribeiro, says. There is another school of thought, however, that suggests being a woman is a major advantage these days, owing to the current state of Formula One racing. The fact that Michael Schumacher was such a consistent victor actually eroded enthusiasm for the sport over time. Many hope that a new face, particularly a female face, might reignite interest in Formula One, just as Danica Patrick has brought new life to Indy car racing. (Indy's sagging television ratings soared in 2005, thanks largely to her participation.) Lots of people follow racing only casually, Ribeiro says, so they need someone who stands out. "You have 20 guys and her [to root for]. Everyone picks her."

Which explains, on many levels, Bia's visit to the salon of Wanderley Nunes, close personal friend of the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen and the country's answer to Frédéric Fekkai. There are attendants in sparkling white uniforms, and clients with more than a passing knowledge of cosmetic surgery. Nunes himself wears a black button-down and black slacks, his hair in a tangle of blond highlights. He has an air of irrepressibility faintly evocative of Santa Claus. Bia greets him lavishly, which is fitting because Nunes not only does her hair but is also one of her sponsors. She wears the "W" logo for his salon on her uniform, just above her heart. The public couldn't care less about Michael Schumacher's coiffure; not so when it comes to Bia Figueiredo, who is here for a cut and blow dry. Brazil may be ready for a woman racecar driver, but she has to be a particular kind of woman. "In today's world, motor sports is a business," Ribeiro says. "You need people who represent the sponsors in a nice way. Bia is feminine in a masculine environment."

This obligation is true not only with fans but, more importantly, with sponsors, who help defray the costs of putting Bia on the track. Car maintenance and race fees can amount to almost $400,000 a year, and Bia earns nothing: no salary from the team, nothing from endorsements. She won't make money unless she gets to Formula One. Bia's sponsors currently cover about 40 percent of her racing costs; Cesário makes up the rest. Her parents are paying all her living expenses. "This is a thing that really worries me," she says, "because if I weren't a driver I would have been working since I was 20 and making money on some other thing. I try to forget this and think that this is my career, and one day I will make money from it. I really trust in it, and my parents support me."

There are other pressures. Specifically, the passing of time: Ribeiro believes Bia has only three more years to make her mark — "Maximum," he says. "It's very difficult. You don't have time to do something parallel. It's a very short period of time." Therefore, instead of a good college, to which she would have surely gained admission, Bia goes to the local community college. She doesn't go to parties or even hang out much with friends. "I don't have time," she says. Her behavior in public must be above reproach: no one wants her to become a tabloid heroine, and no one wants her appearing, like Danica Patrick, in stiletto boots and a bustier in the magazine FHM. In fact, Cesário has warned her never to appear at the racetrack like the guys do, with the tops of their uniforms unzipped and their T-shirts exposed. When Bia and her boyfriend of three years broke up, there was great relief among her management. "We drove together," she says, with more than a small trace of nostalgia. "He was a great guy." Subsequently, Ribeiro asked her to stop dating altogether. "The guys can have one night with a girl. They think a woman can't do that," Bia says, shaking her head in disgust. She says she wants to get married and have children, but figures that can wait until her 30's.

Has it been worth it?, I ask as we drive home from the salon. We are on an empty stretch of highway, damp from a recent rain, and she has moved her speed from 40 to 60 to 80 kilometers per hour. Does she miss having a normal life?

Bia shakes her head and wrinkles her nose, and doesn't even flinch when a motorcyclist in front of us falters slightly before recovering on the uneven pavement. "No," she says. "No way. I have won a lot of maturity. For 21, I am very old in a lot of ways, and a lot of people respect that. I have my life, and I have my objectives."

The road curls sharply, and she accelerates into it. "I love this curve," she says.

Mimi Swartz is an executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine