Looking for an OMNI Magazine short story about unlimited class car racing - called "Formula Zero" or "Formula X" in the story.
Main character is a cyborg, jacks into his vehicle when racing.
He's in a relationship with an activist who is trying to shut racing down. He agrees to have a 'meme bomb' implanted in himself to this end.
This appears to be "Grand Prix" by Simon Ings, published in Omni's June 1993 issue. It is also apparently published in the anthology "Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex" edited by Ellen Datlow.
From the text:
Formula Zero is a race for cars, not drivers. It is a vicious testing bed for crackpot ideas, the way Formula One used to be till the nineteen-seventies and the iron rule of Jean Marie Balestre.
Formula One’s rule book ceased to reflect technical progress around that time. Formula Zero was conceived in the nineties as a way round the role book and into the twenty-first century. Anyway, crashes are good for business. My eyes are full of lignocaine. Underlids count off the seconds. I tense my arse and spool the revcounter into the red, just out of my line of focus. I pop the clench plate into my mouth and bite down. The throttle glows green. I blink. The visor snaps down. It’s made of Kevlar. A projector micropored to my head beams eight external views onto the inner surface of the visor then setttles for center-forward.
and
I’m in a different place. A green hillside. The track is a smooth black nothing under my wheels, swirrling round the hill. I follow it with cybernetic eyes. Gentry in the Ferrari is a blue proximity-danger icon on my left near-side. He cuts me up on the first corner. I’ll use him as a pacemaker. I’m so far ahead of the league table I’d be happy to let him win. But if I don’t pass the post first, then Catharine’s meme-bomb sits in me, waiting for the next victory. It only triggers if I’m race champion. A kind of sick fascination is driving me. That and a hope that the Progamme’s attack on the machismo-oriented Grand Prix might dovetail with my own wish for vengeance on Maureen Havers.
