Eric Bana deliberate man of mystery

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/m...e1977409/page1/

Eric Bana is wearing flame-retardant underwear. This makes me slightly nervous. He is about to take me out for a few hard laps around the Calder Park Raceway, here on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia, and I’m wearing plain old cotton boxers — breathable, sure, but not much protection in the event of a fiery crash.

Bana picks through extra racing gear in the back of his pickup, then tosses me a helmet and one of his spare fireproof jumpsuits. “You’re about my size,” he says, being kind. This is, after all, the guy who played the shirtless Trojan warrior in Troy and the shirtless librarian in The Time Traveler’s Wife. (Much to the delight of Bana’s many female fans, the time traveler’s clothes do not travel with him.) At 42, he’s still so fit he was able to do his own stunts in his latest movie, the combat-intensive Hanna, with almost no time to prepare.

“First lap I’ll take it easy — I want you to see the topography of the racetrack,” Bana says, referring to Calder’s 1.6 miles of high-speed straightaway and turns, 15 of them, some fairly hairpin. “Second lap I’ll speed it up. Third lap we’ll go full-on.” We walk over to the pit lane and locate his race car — a bright blue Porsche that shares the silhouette of a street-legal 911 and not much else. Its 400-horsepower engine propels a featherlight frame, which is why it runs more than $200,000 off the line — and that’s only a tiny fraction of the actual cost of racing. “Every time you go out, it’s $2,400 on tires alone. Just to put the car on the track, you’re looking at 10 grand of wear and tear, and over the course of a race weekend, 20 to 30 grand. If you actually calculate it over kilometers, it’s hideous; it makes you throw up,” Bana says, pulling on his driving gloves. “We don’t discuss that with our wives.”

Bana tries to fit in something like six major racing events a year; it would be more if he didn’t have to make movies in order to pay for those tires. “He’s at the highest level of amateur driving possible,” says friend and fellow driver Peter Hill, the founder of Globe surf wear, who’s also out today for a few practice laps. Last year Hill and Bana drove together at Bathurst, a six-hour relay race. “We were doing extremely well, running fourth and in really good contention for a podium finish,” says Bana. “Then Peter had a small spin and was sitting in the middle of the track when someone ran up his ass at about 100 miles per hour. We were very lucky that no one was hurt.”

Here’s hoping Bana’s luck holds for at least a few more hours.

Thanks Magic

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