PEDALPOWER; Man + bicycle + energy drink + competition from around the country = too much fun.(News)

Byline: ROGER HART

By all measures It was full-tilt racing in downtown Detroit.

No, there were no Champ Cars snarling between skyscrapers, sucking manhole covers off the streets; effete F1 wankers profiling for cameras were nowhere to be seen. But hot-blooded, all-American-street-legal-racing ruled the Motor City at the inaugural Red Bull Dragsterday.

So it didn't signal the return to Detroit of race drivers whom anyone knows, except for maybe NHRA Funny Car driver Whit Bazemore, part of the ASC/AutoWeek entry (more on that later). It was racing. Specifically, head-to-head drag racing on a one-eighth-mile stretch of famous Woodward Avenue.

All the trappings were there, including scantily clad women with umbrellas aloft covering drivers in the staging lanes. A "Christmas tree'' signaled starts. A checkered flag fell at the finish with marshals in between. And there were even a couple of photo finishes to boot. When the day was over, trophy girls planted kisses on the winners, who thanked everyone, including God and sponsors, not necessarily in that order.

So it was racing, even if some competitors among the 31 teams were dressed like Batman, the pope, Star Wars characters, hockey players or newborn babies in tent-sized diapers. The machines they piloted had names like "Fly 'N Cow Pie,'' "Ride of Your Lives,'' "Rodent Racer'' and "Scuderia Pelotas Rossa,'' the AW entry.

Why human-powered drag racing? Red Bull, the energy drink maker forging a name for itself in motorsports around the world, had sponsored an event called flutag or flight day, which challenged people to feats of human-powered flight (i.e. dress up like a hamster or a buzz saw and "fly'' off a pier). The Dragsterday event, at least in the minds of the folks at Red Bull, was spiritually closer to their event marketing program.