ONE FAST CHEF; Cooking (very well) with Corvette Racing.(NEWS)

Byline: J. P. VETTRAINO

Chef Jimmy Schmidt heads to the track caring more about winning than about great food, but the Detroit restaurateur is no ordinary caterer.

Schmidt once showed us how to do haute cuisine under the hood of a car ("Eat Free or Die, AW, Aug. 30, 1993). He owns the Rattlesnake Club, one of Detroit's finest restaurants, and its counterpart in Palm Desert, Calif. He has friends in high places, and for 10 years, he's been chef for the Corvette Racing GT1 team at Le Mans and other endurance races.

If you think pleasing palates at a five-star restaurant might be challenging, try preparing 4,000 meals in six days in the Le Mans paddock.

"It's a lot more intense and crazier than running a restaurant for a week, Schmidt says. "And the challenge is a bit different. We try to get the team, almost unwillingly, to eat well.

Former GM racing boss Herb Fishel, a regular at the Rattlesnake, pulled Schmidt aside in late 1998. How would he like to cook for the soon-to-be-launched Corvette GT1 and Cadillac LMP teams?

Schmidt already knew his way around both a kitchen and a manifold. While studying electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, he had joined a program in France to earn language credits. There he'd enrolled in food and wine courses and decided he'd rather apprentice at a cooking school in Avignon. Diplomas and certificates in classic and nouvelle French cuisine followed, as did postgrad study in management at Harvard.