Guys who might catch the eye of NBA scouts are not apt to find a home in the cockpit of a race car, particularly one of the open-wheel variety. Actually Chris Kneifel tried. At 21 he was the fifth youngest driver in CART history when he was driving for Ron Hemelgarn. He even made it to the Indy 500 in his open-wheel career, an experience which he relishes.

Chris set yet another Indy car record, one that does not sit so pleasantly in his memory. That record came on the last lap of the Michigan 500. It was for enduring the longest extrication of a driver from a wrecked race car by a CART rescue team - some 75 minutes.

Before all the aluminum body work had been unwrapped from his feet, the TV cameras had long since left the scene. Darkness was well underway. Chris had been well-placed in fifth approaching the third turn on the last lap when Rick Mears spun in front of him and hid in a cloud of smoke. Chris found him.

That wasn’t why he left single-seaters. What did him in was the increasing difficulty of folding his six-foot, six-inch frame like a Swiss Army knife to fit into race cars designed for shorter statures. Now he looks upon that blow to his racing hopes as a turning point, not a road block. His career took off in a new direction. Racing for Jack Roush in TransAm, adding Sebring and Daytona to his experiences. And now, to cap a varied career, 39-year-old Chris Kneifel is on the Chevrolet Corvette team in its first concerted factory effort at Le Mans.

Chris shares C5-R No. 63 with fellow Le Mans rookie Ron Fellows and veteran Justin Bell., a.k.a. son of five-time Le Mans winner Derek. Before the April test session at Le Mans, Chris put in some 20 laps - most in a rental car, one on foot (8.45 miles). The storied circuit was not a total stranger to him when he pointed his Corvette’s stylish yellow nose under the Dunlop bridge for the first time.

He’s definitely the big guy on the team, but surprisingly, sharing the car with shorter co-drivers won’t be a problem. "They have fairly long legs," he says of his teammates. Guess Bell and Fellows won’t need those child seats after all.