The Globe and Mail

It was a perfect weekend: Fast car, top down, destination Montreal. Grand Prix time.

I hadn’t watched a Formula One race live since the 1970s. Now it was time to revisit the Vatican of speed, and get answers to some burning questions. Just how fast are the new cars? How tall is Michael Schumacher? And what do the world’s fastest racers drive on the street?

I would get all my answers, and more. As I headed east into the city, the F1 frenzy began: Lamborghinis and Porsches were jousting on the freeway, and a Ferrari drafted me down the off-ramp.

By Saturday afternoon, I was in pit lane, getting a behind-the-scenes look at the new world of Formula One. Things had changed dramatically since my last visit. The cars looked like mutant insects, and hit about 330 km/h down the straightaway. The downshifts sounded like artillery rounds.

The stands were filled with about 300,000 cheering people, but the pits were a different world. Billionaire Richard Branson strolled past. I recognized an actor from the ER television series.

As I strolled the pits, I realized that almost every driver conformed to a human F1 prototype: handsome, excellent hair, fluent in at least three languages. And short. Jarno Trulli, one of the drivers for the Lotus team, stood chatting with a model I recognized from a recent issue of Vogue. The top of his head barely reached her nose.

Schumacher was a little bigger – about 5-foot-8, with the lean, perfect build of a bantamweight fighter. The emphasis on compact size made sense. F1 teams spend millions shaving weight from their cars, and tweaking their shape to minimize drag. A small, lightweight driver is a serious advantage.

As a result, Formula One is based on Darwinian selection. You have to be compact, and you have to be great. There are only 24 drivers in the entire sport. By comparison, the National Hockey League has about 700 players. Tough as it may be, getting into the NHL is like landing a job as a Wal-Mart greeter compared to securing an F1 seat.

The top drivers live like kings. They fly helicopters, cruise on private yachts, and do not hurt for female companionship. The money in the sport was hard to fathom. The F1 circus had arrived in town with seven Boeing 747 cargo planes just days before. Unloading the planes took 63 flatbed trucks. Many of the drivers and team officials had arrived by private jet. The tarmac at Dorval airport was packed.

A temporary city had been built. In a few days. it would disappear, only to be recreated somewhere else. The driver’s private vehicles were parked on a river bank behind the pits. Each spot was labelled with their name. Schumacher had a freshly waxed Mercedes SUV. Ferrari teammates Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso had a matching pair of Ferrari 599s. Red Bull star Mark Webber had an Audi A5 Turbo. But not every driver got to ride in style – in Sauber driver Pedro de la Rosa’s spot was a Hyundai Sonata. And not the current model.