Photograph by Richard Bailey

You know him as a badass Delta sergeant, a green monster, and, most recently, a doting assassin. But away from the screen, the actor is something of a mystery, which is just fine with him. To really understand the man, you have to hit the racetrack and strap in beside him.

by David Katz

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. As we climb into the Porsche — his crew installed a passenger seat for my benefit — Bana tries to convince me that “race cars are actually the safest kind of cars out there.” Really? Safer than, say, a Volvo on carpool duty? “Biking is more dangerous,” Bana insists. (He’s an avid cyclist, too.) “The most scared I think I’ve ever been was biking alone on the PCH in L.A. — that section where you just can’t get off. People murder along on that road. I almost got hit half a dozen times. I finally just stopped, got off my bike, walked across the road in my cycling shoes, and just threw the bike over the barrier to get to where the beach is. That’s much scarier than anything you can do in a car.”

We strap in. “Getting in the car and closing the door, that’s my favorite part,” he says. “No one can get at you, no one can talk to you — that’s the one time you’re completely off-limits.” Sitting in the still car, fully suited up, is so stifling — the thing has been baking in the sun all afternoon — that any fear I had has been replaced by an eagerness to just get moving. Still, we have to wait our turn like every other driver out here — no special movie-star treatment for Bana. “I’ve been part of the racing scene long enough that I’m just part of the furniture,” he says, pleased by this fact. It’s the same reason he still lives in Melbourne, even though that means a 15-hour plane ride whenever he has a meeting in L.A. “It also comes down to the fact that we think Melbourne is a great place to raise our kids,” says his wife, Rebecca, a former TV publicist. (Married for 14 years, the couple has an 11-year-old son, Klaus, and a nine-year-old daughter, Sophia.) “And Eric’s a really big Australian-rules football fan. I don’t think he could live without it.”

The track manager eventually pokes his head through our window. “Don’t you know that you never get in the car with a race-car driver?” he asks me, laughing but not entirely joking. Since it’s highly irregular to carry a passenger, the manager’s plan was to clear the track for our run. But it’s crowded today, and that would be, well, sort of a pain in his ass. “I’ve made a decision,” he says to Bana. “I’m not gonna tell anybody else that he’s out there. Just don’t terrify him, and try to bring him back in one piece.”

Bana lets the engine growl a bit, then shifts into gear. A little gas and the Porsche tears down the first straightaway.

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