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If your palms are clammy enough, the supple leather wrapped around a BMW 540's steering wheel becomes slimy to the touch. If your body is tense enough, the plush seat feels as hard as a church pew. And if your nerves are frayed enough, the gearbox will seem like it belongs in a garbage truck. All these sensations coursed through me last spring as

I prepared to hurl down one of the world's best racetracks in an $80,000 Bimmer. Anxiety so paralyzed my brain that the simplest instruction—"Only rule is, don't crash the car," delivered by John Hamilton, my passenger and the owner of both the track and the car—sounded as complex as particle physics.

Behind the wheel of my own car, I have a flawless driving record. Not a dinged fender or moving violation to speak of. The story is different, however, when I'm piloting other people's wheels. Something happens then, some delinquent hormone squirts into my bloodstream, dulling any sense of order. Before the age of 21, I piled my father's VW van into the bushes, caved the front fender of my aunt's Ford Windstar on a pine tree, lost the muffler of my dad's vintage Jaguar on a logging road and tore two hubcaps off a rental car while attempting a power-slide in a 7-11 parking lot. There's more, but you get the picture: Don't lend me your car.

This blooper reel unfurled in my mind as I prepared to round the Calabogie Motorsports Park, a two-year-old racetrack about an hour west of Ottawa. I'd come to find out how a track ranked by some driving connoisseurs among the top three on the continent ended up deep in the Ontario sticks, where the ride of choice is a Ford F-350 diesel hauling two ATVs.

Naturally, I knew my own reckless need for fuel-injected thrills isn't unique among North American men. It's so common, in fact, that Hamilton and his five partners built their business plan around wannabe Andrettis like us. The track—a five-kilometre knot of hairpin turns stamped upon a 1,200-acre plot of moose swamp—would challenge the best drivers in the world, but there isn't a grandstand or a pit crew in sight. The target is the Sunday racer, the type who watches Jeff Gordon tear around an oval and thinks, "Dang, I could do that."

With boomers in possession of more loot and leisure than ever, a flood of new driving enthusiasts has screeched onto the roughly 100 tracks throughout North America. "There's definitely been a lot of growth in the private car-club market lately," says Martin Tekela, vice-president of the Porsche Club of America's Ontario chapter, which has grown almost 30% to 1,400 members in the last couple of years. "And these tracks are laughing all the way to the bank."

At 56, Tekela is typical of the drivers who frequent Calabogie. A successful sales and marketing consultant, he teaches skiing in the winter and driving in the summer. He and his wife, a fellow driving fanatic he met at the track, try to restrict their speedway dates—at about $350 a pop—to under 30 a year. They don't always succeed. "It's hard to stay away," he says. "Driving is high-speed meditation. It's about enjoying the car for what it was designed to do. It's the world's greatest adult roller-coaster."

Still, plunked down on the outskirts of a minuscule town, where snow covers the track from October through late May, the $12-million venture seems far-fetched. "I know, in mosports, it's never the first owner that makes money," says John Hamilton. "The second owner does, because the first owner goes broke and has to sell the track to somebody for pennies on the dollar. I looked at a lot of racetracks in North America before I put money into this one, and there's a heartbreak story in nearly every one."

Ask people two towns away for directions to Calabogie and they'll shrug their shoulders like they've never heard of it. Google Maps takes a few extra seconds to compute the five-hour route from Toronto, and even then the journey requires bumping across dirt roads. At Munford's Restaurant & Gas Bar, you can put a bathing suit, fishing rod, scrambled eggs, camo pants, fresh butter tarts and a tank of gas on one bill. So when I first laid eyes on this 2,000-strong hamlet, I carefully formulated my opening question for Hamilton: How the hell do you expect to make money in a place like this? When I finally levelled the query, the two of us were digging into runny eggs at Munford's a couple of hours before Hamilton would hand me the keys to his BMW.

He swallowed a scoop of hash browns. "Think of a guy who goes out to the local Porsche dealer, buys a Porsche, but he's got nowhere to drive fast. So he goes to his local Porsche club. Well, what the Porsche club does for members is organize outings to tracks like ours. They'll drive eight hours from New York or Vermont and bring 180 drivers for an event here. Basically, this is where guys learn why they spent $100,000 on their cars."

For just one day at the track, the car club will pay around $10,000. Not a bad haul, especially considering that Hamilton, who serves as Calabogie's VP of operations, doesn't have to be at the track. He just ensures a full crew of safety and emergency personnel is on duty, and he can go back to his day job as a car broker in Ottawa. Last year, the track's first full year of operation, Calabogie pulled in $700,000 in revenues. With bookings already approaching capacity, the partners expect to top $1 million next year.

Hamilton's friend and partner Marc Steenbakkers was the first to recognize the money-making potential of a new track. They're both long-time car buffs, and through the late '90s, they scratched their racing itch once a year at Shannonville Motorsport Park, an hour west of Kingston. "Some businesses take clients out to the golf course or a hockey arena," says Steenbakkers, an Ottawa investment adviser. "Instead of that, John and I would go to the track. The clients loved it."

Steenbakkers originally floated the idea of building an indoor go-cart track, but the numbers didn't add up. So they started thinking bigger. Then, around 2001, something happened. Shannonville no longer had any days open for them. They called every track within a 10-hour drive and got the same answer: We're booked. "Everyone was turning me away," says Steenbakkers. "I was offering $5,000 to $8,000 a day"

They knew they were onto something. Further digging showed them that over the past decade, recreational interest in high-performance driving had boomed. Alan Wilson, the designer of the Calabogie track whose name cachet Hamilton compares to that of Jack Nicklaus in golf courses, says this popularity surge is partly due to improvements in car technology, which allow people to be fast and furious without being unsafe. "The base BMW today is as good as most production race cars 10 years ago," says Wilson. "The brakes are better, the engine is better, the car is safer. It is now very easy for someone to take their BMW or Corvette and go play for a day without modifying with roll cages and safety equipment. And tracks are only just starting to pick up on this market."

The almost four-year-old Autobahn Country Club near Chicago has been a front-runner in exploiting this amateur market. With two Alan Wilson tracks, a bar, meeting rooms, and condos coming soon, the ACC is one of the world's first racing complexes catering entirely to non-competitive drivers. "The success they're having there is absolutely startling," says Wilson. "It's expanding every day."

The swelling ranks of car clubs have come to dominate the track scene so heavily that the Autobahn and other such venues barely qualify as racetracks, as most clubs have strict no-racing policies, ban timing devices and discourage passing on the track. That helps protect the clubs and the tracks from lawsuits, as do the comprehensive liability forms everyone must sign.

Encouraged by what he had learned, Steenbakkers had one more test. He offered to buy an existing track for what he knew was an inflated sum, but was rebuffed. "That was the answer I wanted to hear," he says. "If I couldn't even buy a track, then I thought, 'Screw it, I'm going to build my own.'"

Next, he and Hamilton needed partners bearing five unique gifts: land, heavy equipment, money, marketing talent and, most of all, patience. "I'd done my homework and I knew the process was going to take a long time," says Steenbakkers.

He had no idea.

They soon signed up two tech millionaires: future Ottawa mayor Larry O'Brien and car enthusiast Bruce Gregory. Finding a location where they could build was a big hang-up until Steenbakkers mentioned the track idea to a land-developer couple in the Calabogie area. It turned out they owned a nearby gravel pit surrounded by moose and turtle habitat. "That's when the light bulb went on," says Steenbakkers, who toured the property with Hamilton in January, 2003. "I knew we wanted to do it on or near a gravel pit so we could easily make the asphalt. We had a deal within a week."

That turned out to be the easy part, because they still had to convince several levels of government and the residents of bucolic Calabogie to embrace a rumbling, fume-spewing racetrack. "People get so emotional when they first hear about something like this," says Hamilton. "It took a long time to convince people that we weren't building a NASCAR oval and there wouldn't be tens of thousands of people choking the town a few times a year. We don't even have seating at the track."

To help minimize the track noise and community outcry, the two men enlisted noise engineers and Wilson, who not only sat in on meetings with residents, but designed a series of berms along the track to muffle the sound of the engines. Pretty soon, most of the 400 or so Calabogians who'd initially objected to the construction softened their positions. Many of them began seeing potential economic spinoffs. Local hotel owners envisaged no-vacancy signs in summer, traditionally slower than the winter season when skiers flock to the area. Munford's even installed a high-octane gas pump.

After much wrangling before the Ontario Municipal Board, the investors' company, TrackCorpCanada, was finally given temporary three-year approval in July, 2006—three years after Hamilton and Steenbakkers had first walked the property. But the government okay came with several caveats. Most notably, the track had to meet strict noise restrictions, necessitating the construction of an additional berm. Noise limits also applied to individual cars, whether they were idling or zooming by. Any violation would cost $500 and a whole lot of bad press, so the partners hired a full-time sound-testing crew.

These types of hoops are not unusual in track building, says Wilson, adding that community members have every reason to be concerned about noise, property values, and car crazies roaring down Main Street. "Certainly, I've turned down a lot of projects where I thought this might be the case," he says. "But Calabogie was different."

The difference was geography. Most proposed track developments sit near dense populations, often tourist towns, so they can feed off those markets. In the case of Calabogie, the nearest residents were at least a kilometre away. What's more, much of the track would be sunk into an old gravel quarry, "one of the biggest sound holes I've ever worked with," says Wilson. "I knew the noise would be muted."

The criticisms haven't stopped since the track opened in September, 2006. More than 280 complaints were lodged last year, though only two resulted in fines. "About 90% of the complaints stem from about 20 households still trying to make our lives difficult," says Hamilton.

It's hard not to sympathize with the critics. Calabogie lies in Ottawa's cottage country, where families come for peace and quiet. On warm weekends, a low hum from the track is ever-present throughout the town. But last year, the municipal board made the approval permanent. For the time being, the dissenters have run out of options.

As I rounded the track with Hamilton beside me, I was struck again by how remote the place is—nothing but trees, track and a couple of port-o-johns. But the isolation won't last long if the partners' ambitious development plans for the 1,200 acres move ahead on schedule: construction of a control tower, condos, an off-road track, and a fleet of high-performance rental cars, much like at the Autobahn in Chicago. "What people want is more of a country club atmosphere," says Steenbakkers. They figure it will take three to five years to get there.

But, Hamilton adds, "First and foremost, we wanted to build a gem of a track. Without that, real track rats won't come back." This year, Calabogie hosted two professional races, but the focus remains on amateurs. The rest of the weekends have been booked solid with car and motorcycle clubs, high-performance driving schools and car manufacturers' promotional events. At other times, individual drivers can slap down $350 and spend the day rounding the track.

Track architect Wilson has seen many half-baked plans, but he thinks Hamilton and SteenBakkers's strategy is solid. So far, barely a dozen similar, club-oriented tracks exist in all of North America, setting up Calabogie as a preferred destination for any enthusiast within a day's drive—a marketplace that includes New York, Boston and Toronto. And the beauty is that, even as business grows, it's unlikely to take over the partners' lives. "It's the most amount of money with the least amount of effort," says Steenbakkers. "In golf, everyone pays you 100 bucks for green fees and you have to deal with 200 people a day. With, say, the Porsche club, it's one cheque, one person to deal with. The barriers to entering this business are high, sure, but it makes for a very stable revenue base once you get going."

Even great businesses are subject to the vagaries of the market, however. The investment group spent $1 million more on building the track than it had anticipated because the spiralling price of oil made asphalt more expensive. That overrun meant spending on other parts of the project was delayed, which explains why the park still didn't have electricity when I visited in May. (When I ask four months later whether the facility now has permanent bathrooms, Hamilton replies with an exuberant "You bet") Meanwhile, car clubs are reporting a tailing-off in attendance due to high gas prices. "When I'm on the track, my car goes through 35 litres in 100 kilometres," says the Porsche club's Tekela. "That's up to two tanks a day. For some, that gets to be a real consideration."

The town, at least, is offering less resistance these days. At one point in the afternoon, I took a spot alongside ambulance driver Bob Patrick, a long-time area resident, and we watched about 30 enthusiasts scream by as part of a weekend racing school. "They're slow today," says Patrick, leaning over a guardrail. About 100 people like Patrick have found seasonal work at the track, and every hotel within 50 kilometres gets booked up during big events, such as a motorcycle race held last May. "A lot of the locals were against this thing from the beginning," he says, "but they're in the minority now. And a lot of them were part-time residents anyway. Anyone with a long-term interest in the economy of this place is all for it."

John Maloney, a 24-year-old member of an Ottawa motorsports club, finished his lesson and came over to rave about the turns that beg drivers to speed up and then punish them when they do. "It's an insane track," said Maloney, who drives an old Subaru Legacy. "If you don't get your line just right, you're screwed."

I knew what he meant. That morning in the Bimmer, I rounded the first few turns at granny speed, shifting early so as not to alarm Hamilton, who was watching my line like a hawk from the passenger seat. But if he was regretting the decision to lend me his car for a rip around the track, he wasn't showing it. "Feel free to get the revs up," he said nonchalantly. "She'll perform better that way."

I'd come prepared. Just minutes earlier, track co-owner Bruce Gregory had given me a crash course in racing from the driver's seat of a Porsche GT3. "It's all about getting the weight on the right tires at the right time," he instructed as we screamed around corners at 150 kilometres per hour and down straightaways at 230.

About halfway through my first lap with Hamilton, I realized how futile the lessons were.

"There's your apex there," Hamilton said, pointing to an orange cone.

"What does that mean?"

"That's where you want to aim during the turn."

I leaned his car through a horrible line that didn't even come close to the cone. Hamilton's expression grew anxious. He suggested we hit the pits, but I insisted on one more lap, and tried to take it with a little more speed. As I rolled through the course, he provided navigational tips. Even with his help, I became confused during an early big turn. "Okay, here comes our first blind corner," he warned. "So hold on, hold on, don't turn yet... Now turn... Turn... No, no, no, that's the other track. That's the wrong way"

We were heading toward a wall of pylons marking off a service road between the west and east sides of the course. As I tried to block out the image of orange cones lodged in the Bimmer's grille,

I searched my head for Gregory's turning tips. Finding nothing, I hit the brakes and veered left. The big car yawed. Its nose slowly edged back on the track.

"Oops," I said after I had straightened out the car.

"Yeah. We didn't want to do that."

But I did want to do it again. Even after two disastrous laps, I was hooked. Later, I spent 20 minutes studying a map of the track's 20 turns, intent on getting them right next time out. When I told Alan Wilson I was determined to master his creation, he took on the tone of a seer. "It will take you three or four days to feel confident. And each time, you will go away feeling that you didn't get it quite right, that you just have to come back. Let me tell you, you could go back to Calabogie 50 times and still not get it right. It will hook you like that."