Attorney Is on the Fast Track to a New Career in Car Racing

Mike Dow is the kind of guy who finds that sky-diving and hang-glider racing can get boring.

Combat duty in Vietnam, confronting a drawn pistol in a courtroom--where his job was to send people to jail--those too rank barely a mention when Dow discusses some of life’s great moments.

But his eyes light up when he talks about his favorite pastime: race car driving.

“Racing right now is my all-time passion,” the 40-year-old former prosecutor said with childlike enthusiasm.

Dow, who now works full time as a criminal defense attorney in Santa Ana, moonlights as a professional race car driver. Since taking up the sport two years ago, he has entered 22 racing events as an amateur and competed in his first race as a professional at the Long Beach Grand Prix this year.

His professional racing debut was less than ceremonious: He completed only five of the 40 laps when his engine blew and he had to drop out of the race. Did that dissuade him? Hardly. Dow is set to celebrate his 41st birthday June 20 by competing in the Detroit Grand Prix.

Although he took up race car driving only recently, Dow has nurtured a passion for the sport since his childhood in Washington, D.C., where he accompanied his family to racing events.

“I always wanted to do it, but until now I didn’t have the money,” he said.

The money came later, after he served a yearlong tour in Vietnam, then completed law school and joined the Orange County district attorney’s office in 1977. That’s when he took up sky-diving, hang-glider racing, helicopter flying and polo.

He even bought half-interest in an antique plane to putter around in. But that’s so boring he just mentions it in passing. Those are “things most anybody can do,” he explains.

Although he had a modicum of excitement on the job (once the mother of a murder victim confronted the suspect with a gun in court), Dow said he was getting bored. Hang-glider racing didn’t have the same old zing. He took to piloting helicopters, but after a while, that became such a yawn he quit it altogether.

Then about three years ago, while he and his wife, Sharon, were attending a conference near Monterey, Dow meandered over to the nearby Laguna Seca raceway. That’s when he became hooked.

The next summer, he enrolled in a three-day racing course at Laguna Seca. That December he completed his training at Riverside International Raceway. And in January, 1987, he and a partner invested in an open-wheel, open-cockpit Super V racing car. They headed out onto the amateur circuit, competing in events from Dallas to Portland. He never finished better than second in those purseless events.

Undaunted, Dow cracked the big time this year when he qualified for the Long Beach race. Although he finished 37th in a field of 38, he said it was still a thrill to rub shoulders with such greats as actor-racer Paul Newman, practically a regular competitor at such events.

The kick is so great that he hopes to become a professional driver full time, if he can attract enough sponsorship. In the meantime, he uses a volunteer crew.

Dow’s car, with a top speed of 165 m.p.h., does not compare in power to the ones in the Indianapolis 500, where formula race cars reach speeds of more than 200 m.p.h.

But 165 m.p.h. is plenty fast for his wife, who, he said, supports his racing as long as it doesn’t get any faster. The couple has a 2-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.

For his part, Dow says he is well aware of the potential danger.

“I’m not stupid enough to think I can’t get hurt doing this,” he said. “Last year, a tire blew out on a curve and sent me spinning into the guardrail. The right rear of my car was sheared off, and it knocked me silly. I had a headache and a sore neck for about a week, but I was back to racing in two weeks.”

People columnist Herbert J. Vida is on vacation.