There's a secondhand Porsche with a bauhinia symbol on its roof sitting outside the One-Fifth bar in Star Street in Wan Chai. It took sleepless nights, hours of agony, phone calls, hope, muscle, desire, pure business sense and a man who can appreciate what it means to be as crazy as a box of frogs to park that Porsche here.

In a week, it will be put to work. On July 10, it will compete in the second race of the Le Mans Endurance Series at Monza, Italy, on its way to the 24 Hours at Le Mans sports car race, one of the world's most prestigious - and macho - racing events. The car made its successful track debut this week at Snetterton in the UK.

Taking this Porsche GT3 RSR to its limits will be Matthew Marsh, 2004 Porsche Infineon Carrera Cup champion, and Darryl O'Young, who aspires to be the first Chinese driver to race at Le Mans.

"This is a team with `Made in Hong Kong' stamped all over it,'' says O'Young. "We aim to give the people of Hong Kong something to be proud of.''

Running a little late to our dinner meeting, Marsh strolls into the Foreign Correspondents' Club carrying an aluminum briefcase. He is smiling confidently and looks like James Bond with a tight-cropped beard.

"I don't like to eat where it's quiet,'' he says, looking around, but we settle into a cushy booth and mull for a moment whether the atmosphere lends itself to boisterous male banter about cars. It will suffice.

Marsh is affable, witty and a good conversationalist. It appears he still bears the characteristics that led his first driving instructor to fail him in his first road test: "Over-confident,'' he was labelled.

I fully expect he will be the cocky racing car driver. I am wrong.

"You probably believe that when we drive the racing cars it's all about gnashing teeth and clenched fists,'' he says. But it is not so. Marsh says that racing is the work of someone who can focus at 250 kph.

"[Racing] needs to be very calm, very precise, very well planned and clearly thought through,'' he explains. "On board, the driver is almost still and making only very small hand movements.''

This precision and familiarity with the sport is exactly why sponsors have put HK$12 million behind Marsh, 36, and his co-pilot, the handsome 25-year-old O'Young.

The stakes for this team are high. Marsh and O'Young

want to show that a city always boxing above its weight can do the same in Europe's most famous endurance racing series. Most of all, though, for owners, sponsors and team members alike, it's about doing something positive for China.

The sport is new to Southeast Asia. China has only one Formula 1 race track, in Shanghai, and it recently built a Formula 3 all-purpose track in Zhuhai. The only other high-profile track in the region exists in Sampang, Malaysia.

"To listen to the Chinese national anthem on the podium, if we win the championship, that is the dream,'' says Kenny Chen, president of GruppeM Investments, the sponsor with a majority stake in the racing team. Chen has sunk his own money into starting up this team in a sport where rebuilding and rehauling, tooling and calibrations eat away at funds. "You are talking about fighting with all the best teams in the world,'' says Chen.

"What convinced me was that Darryl and Matthew are pushing themselves very hard to be successful drivers,'' he adds.

Vancouver-born O'Young

has raced karts after school and on weekends in Canada and the United States since he was eight years old. He won National Championships in both countries and the Northwest Canada Championships before he even had a license.

"I've never really done endurance racing,'' he says.

He does a cardio workout on a bike for about two hours every day and with Marsh's coaxing has taken on a special diet to prepare his body for several grueling 1,000-kilometer races that will mark their path to the 24-hour race next June.

After Monza, they face more endurance races in Silverstone in the UK, Nurburgring in Germany and Istanbul.

They finish the pre-season at the 12 Hours of Sebring race in Florida next March.

A good result there, plus their performances over the endurance series, will decide whether they enter the 74th Le Mans next year. That may flush cheeks and make schoolboys dream but the romance of racing cars and the machismo of full-throttle adrenal glands is just the movies, says Marsh.

Le Mans is virtually unknown in China, O'Young says. Ask friends in Asia about Le Mans and, as the owner of a local bar told me recently, "Well, it's just a Formula 3 race.

It's just another race in Europe.''

That it most definitely is not and that's where O'Young's mission comes in.

Despite all of his experience - he placed fifth in the Carrera Cup last year - O'Young has never competed in Europe, but he's raced for 18 years in North America. He figures he's bringing something new to Hong Kong.

It used to be that Victoria Park would have a kart racing competition, but all the drivers tended to be European. "In Hong Kong you [didn't] see people having go-karts in their garage and going racing on weekends,'' he says.

His father believes that has to do with class divisions. Sam O'Young, native of Tsingtao, moved to Hong Kong in 1949 to escape the Cultural Revolution. When he moved to Vancouver in 1967, it was to experience the freedom of being an aircraft engineer with time to work on cars, his passion. "In Hong Kong back then - and maybe still today - there's always [been] a dividing line between white collar and blue collar,'' he says. "The North Americans don't have that kind of dividing line.''

The elder O'Young started the Vancouver Chinese Motor Sports Club in 1970 and by the time his son was eight he had bought him his own kart.

Now Darryl is bringing his years of experience back to Hong Kong, where he'll pursue Le Mans as an extension of his father's dream. It is a long way from the days when Canadians would sneer "Don't drive like a Chinaman.''

Chinese have been excluded from motor racing largely because like polo, it is a "rich guy's sport,'' says Sam. Many of them never have had access to that kind of privilege. "The Chinese, because of the political situation, never recognized motor sport as a sport,'' he says. They saw it as a clubby clique, a "Europe 2,'' where people owned the cars just to own them. That is an attitude Darryl O'Young wants to dismantle by bringing his ethnicity to the pinnacle of the sport.

"To see China excel in [motor sports] is my dream,'' he tells me in a coffee shop. He moved to Hong Kong last year with a marketing degree and a few contacts. He has moved this far on self-motivation and his rack-and-pinion nerves. He is smooth, not easily pressured, quiet and is grateful his dedication has been acknowledged.

Marsh identifies with that dedication. He reached into his own pockets to buy a secondhand car he raced in his spare time a few years ago. He's experienced setbacks that make him more seasoned to failure and the requirement that one must learn to succeed. "I had to think, who around me knew how to do things?'' he says. He'd call experts to extract wisdom about gear shifts and braking. It was futile.

"It was obvious I wasn't good at it,'' he says. "I stopped racing and got into working.'' He got work reporting on races for StarTV. But he kept racing.

Then, in 2003, Jebsen Porsche driver Anil Thadani got shingles. He called Marsh and asked him to race as his replacement. "I turned up and finished first. He was my best friend after that,'' says Marsh.

He impressed a few big names in sports marketing, inking deals with UPS, then Red Bull. Tim Huxley, managing director for GR Asia, orchestrated his funding for the Macau Grand Prix, where Marsh took pole position ahead of Alex Yoong and Charles Kwan, who won the championship that year.

According to Ian Geekie, general manager of Carrera Cup Asia, the championship series that Marsh won last year, it takes a lot to convince sponsors to fund an unknown. Marsh and O'Young's sponsors were able to see the best of Hong Kong values in the two drivers - a will to succeed and an appetite to learn.

Last year Marsh looked around the circuit at Le Mans. He saw drivers he knew, a lot of racers he could beat. He swore he would never go back to the track until he was racing on it, he says, a little teary at the reminiscence.

I ask him whether he is really connected to his car and the romance of racing. He doesn't think so.

Every car races in its own way. Every driver must meld with the car he drives. If a driver can shave off a few seconds, it's because he's figured out what the car will take at that specific moment. It's not all gristle and ego. It's a connection.

After he won the Carrera Cup last year, Marsh was all alone with the car before it was to be put away in the trailer to end the season. "It wouldn't be very nice, would it?'' he says of the moment he had to see it packed away. He walked over to it: "I gave it a kiss on the bonnet.''

His engineer at the time, Matt Liddey, says: "People talk about cars having a soul or personality. To an extent, that's true.''

If Marsh and O'Young are the underdogs on the track - and they are - they don't show it. At the launch party for the car, they are chatty and amiable, and Marsh invites one kid to sit on the car bonnet for a photo op. "Thank you for your support,'' O'Young calls to well-wishers. In the background the 1971 Steve McQueen movie, Le Mans, is running on a widescreen.

A week earlier, when he was running with O'Young in a training session, Marsh stopped to give his partner a bit of advice. "Whatever you do, just make sure it's natural and you want to do it,'' he said.

A toast, then. To victory. And the beginning of history.

douglas.crets@singtaonewscorp.com