The relatively fast show

Making his debut in Formula 3, the training ground for Formula 1 world champions, the Bathgate boy, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious McLaren Autosport Young Driver of the Year Award, will not only be carrying the expectations of teammates and friends, but those of his family - for racing runs in his blood.

Like an inordinate number of motor racing greats, Di Resta’s family background is enough to persuade you there is such a thing as a go-faster gene. Not only did his businessman father Louis win four Scottish Formula Ford championships, but his cousin and mentor is Dario Franchitti, the American Indy League star (and husband of actress Ashley Judd). Franchitti’s younger brother, Marino, has also made a name for himself in the American LeMans series, while back home, Di Resta’s 15-year old brother is already excelling on the karting track.

It has been quite a month so far for Paul, a former Bathgate Academy pupil now regarded as one of the world’s most promising motor racing talents. Last week, he signed a contract with Mercedes as a driver for next season’s Formula 3 Euroseries, then Sunday saw him in London, where fellow Scot David Coulthard presented him with the Young Driver of the Year Award (cousin Dario is a former winner, as is Coulthard), which brought him a 50,000 cash prize as well as a Formula 1 test with McLaren. Within hours of receiving the award, he was winging his way to Bahrain to join his teammates at Manor Motorsport for his greatest challenge yet, tomorrow’s F3 Superprix, the Middle East’s first Formula 3 championship.

The Young Driver Award was a big feather in his cap, he said in Bahrain yesterday, jubilant but highly focused on the race to come. "It’s a great thing to have on your CV and it’s nice to have the privilege of being part of it all and also getting a Formula 1 test at the end of it, as well as the money," he adds.

Di Resta, who finished third in the Formula Renault UK Championship this year, is treating his debut F3 race as a dry run for future events. "I don’t know what to expect yet. It’s going to be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done probably, but I’m going to treat it as dry testing and see what I have to improve on for next year."

BUT AS HE WALKS out to his sleek little Dallara Mercedes, Di Resta will be conscious of following in the footsteps of other members of his high-speed Scottish-Italian family. With him is cousin, Dario, who reckons "the sky’s the limit" if Di Resta lives up to his promise - and that could well be true if Franchitti is anything to go by. Although born in Broxburn and brought up in Bathgate, the 31-year-old driver’s lifestyle in the US, where he has been based for the past seven years, is a far cry from his West Lothian days. He now lives on a ranch in Nashville with Judd.

A multi-millionaire who collects Ferraris and is a licensed helicopter pilot, Franchitti made his name in US CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) events before switching to the Indy Racing league series. Although a back injury sustained in an off-track accident cramped his style last year, he finished the 2004 season in sixth place in the IRL points championship.

Back in West Lothian, where Franchitti’s earliest cars could be seen parked outside the Di Resta’s caf in Whitburn, cousin Paul seemed destined for racetrack greatness from the word go. "I’ve been interested since I was two or three," he says. "It was just growing up among it all, me and my dad. I was never into football or anything, just cars"

His father, wealthy businessman and nightclub owner Louis Di Resta, agrees. "He started driving a quad motorbike when he was two years and 8 months, and he was in a go-kart by the time he was three - car-racing mad from the minute he opened his eyes," he says.

Louis himself chalked up success in karting before going on the Formula Ford circuit in the late Eighties and winning four Scottish championships. But after watching how his son took to go-karts, he decided to concentrate on him. Now his other son, Stefan, at 15, is showing a similar aptitude at karting.

THAT SPEED GENE again? Is it high-powered nature or nurture which causes motorsport to boast such a striking number of racing families: in Scotland, apart from the Di Resta-Franchitti clan, there are the rallying McRaes and Sir Jackie Stewart and his son, Paul. Then there have been the likes of Graham and Damon Hill, John Surtees (the only man to win world titles on two and four wheels) and his karting son Henry, and Sir Jack Brabham, whose three sons also went into motor racing, not to mention the father-and-son land and water speed record-breakers Sir Malcom and Donald Campbell. Then, further afield, you have the Schumachers, the Fittipaldis, the Villeneuves...

Jimmy McRae, five times British rally champion and father of the similarly speedy Colin and Alister (who lost his World Championship chances to a broken differential in Australia last month), agrees: "there must be something there".

"I mean, my father was interested in cars way back, when there were very few vehicles around," he adds. "And I suppose he liked to drive fast as well, although he never competed. But since then there’s been me and Colin and Alister, so somebody sparks it off somewhere."

McRae, who, at 61, won last weekend’s Killarney Lakes Historic Rally in a ’74 Porsche, doesn’t believe a family disposition towards motorsport can be put down to peer pressure. "You can’t pressurise someone into that," he says. "They’re either interested or they’re not, and if they are because their father or brother has done it before them, it’s just so much easier for them to get involved than to go in raw. Obviously the experience gained by the older ones gets passed on. So our kids were encouraged. Colin followed me around when he could and Alister was the same, and obviously the passion was there. I could pass on a bit of help where I could - but once you’re at the wheel, it’s up to you."

In Dundee University’s department of psychology, Professor Trevor Harley reckons there are a number of factors which make families take to the track - and he doesn’t rule out genetics. "Obviously, once someone in the family does it, someone else is more likely to do so. That’s true of professions as well - if the father’s a doctor, the children are as likely as not to be doctors," he says.

"I don’t know how much money you need to become a racing driver, and obviously it helps if there’s someone in the family to open doors for you, but there’s presumably also some genetic component as well. You need very fast reactions to drive a racing car, so there must be some inherited aspect to that.

"I suspect its all of these things - genes, family and social environment, as well as having connections."

BACK IN BAHRAIN, as the latest scion of the Di Resta- Franchitti dynasty prepares to see how his racing pedigree will kick in tomorrow, Paul Di Resta pays credit to his family. "Without them I wouldn’t be here," he says. "It was my dad, really, who got me into motor racing. I was away racing with him every weekend as a child and I was just hungry to be part of it. But seeing what Dario’s done really pushes me and I obviously want to equal that, if not better it."

Having a racing family behind you does help in opening doors, he agrees: "It’s never easy getting involved in motor sport, or in getting big companies to back you. Not like football, where there are umpteen teams you can go to."

At home in Bathgate, waiting on tenterhooks for tomorrow’s news from Bahrain, Louis - like Jimmy McRae - reckons there must be "something" in the family make-up. "Every one of them that’s sat in a car has done well from the word go. It might be in the genes. I honestly don’t know. It just seems to shine through."

And while he agrees that training an aspiring F1 champ is a costly business, he insists that, despite his own and Dario’s wealth, they’ve done it on a shoestring.

"To take someone to the end of Formula 3, you’d need two million quid. We’ve done it on a quarter of that."

HOWEVER, HE reckons that the two most important things he and Dario taught Di Resta were self-reliance - and that killer instinct: "One of the first things we taught him when he was just eight and in a go-kart was: one, don’t ever come in and blame the gears if you did wrong - blame yourself; and, two, there are 24 other guys on the track, but just downgrade them right away and believe in yourself."