The red Hummer drove forward about 50 yards, cut left, then right and drove straight for another hundred yards or so, avoiding a couple of plastic garbage cans in its path.

Fancier, death-defying driving no doubt was then being displayed on the Parkway West, but for more than 100 people gathered at the former LTV site in Hazelwood yesterday morning, this simple maneuver merited a round of applause.

This was, after all, no ordinary H1 Hummer, but a driverless, robotic vehicle dubbed H1ghlander, one of two autonomous SUVs being prepared by Carnegie Mellon University's Red Team for this fall's 175-mile Grand Challenge race in the desert Southwest.

Two officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the event sponsor, were on hand to evaluate H1ghlander's performance.

This week and next, DARPA officials are making site

visits to all 118 teams entered in the race as they prepare to narrow the field to just 40 teams.

Donald Woodbury and Maj. Fred Kennedy, DARPA program managers, were mum about how H1ghlander performed yesterday, but team members were clearly pleased. "Impeccable" is how team leader and namesake William "Red" Whittaker described the demonstrations.

Four times, H1ghlander ran the 200-meter mandatory course, staying within the 25 mph limit DARPA set, but "with a little heat," Whittaker said. In one run, the vehicle completed the course in 24 seconds; even a human driver, Whittaker maintained, couldn't drive the course in less than 22 seconds.

Then the vehicle ran a one-kilometer "optional" course of the team's own design, intended to impress the judges and help ensure that the vehicle is one of the 40 invited to this fall's qualifying event in California. The course included several rough areas that team member Alex Gutierrez described as "whoop-de-doos."

"We showed them a little body English, a lot of terrain hits, a lot of bouncing," said Whittaker, who rode with Kennedy and Woodbury in a Cadillac Escalade chase vehicle behind H1ghlander.

To finish the optional run, the vehicle swooped underneath a railroad trestle at the north end of the LTV site, a maneuver that will be necessary during the Oct. 8 race and one that, if misjudged, could seriously damage the vehicle.

"It's hard to put into words how what we saw today is non-trivial," Whittaker said afterward. H1ghlander, like other entrants, is not remotely controlled, but is fully autonomous, using on-board computers and sensors to determine where to drive.

The Grand Challenge is intended to spur innovation in driverless vehicles, a key technology for the future military. "We're trying to get the folks, the soldiers, out of some of the scary places," Kennedy explained.

In the $2 million-winner-take-all race, the vehicles have up to 10 hours to negotiate a still-secret course across desert trails, roads and rocks. Last year's first Grand Challenge, the Red Team's Sandstorm vehicle went just 7.4 miles before getting stuck; no other entry got as far.

Sandstorm, a heavily modified 1986 Humvee, has since been rebuilt and is the Red Team's other entry in the race. DARPA officials will conduct a site visit for Sandstorm next week at the Nevada Automotive Test Center, where it is being tested.

In the first race, any vehicle that could have finished the course would have won. But Whittaker said he believes eight to 10 teams may be capable of finishing this year's race, so simply staying on course will not be sufficient to win; vehicles also will have to be fast.

Yesterday marked the end of the team's technology development period, Whittaker said. From here on, the 40 members of the Red Team, along with sponsors such as Boeing, Caterpillar and AM General, will conduct tests to make sure that the vehicle and the extra gear now mounted inside, on its roof and on its front bumper can withstand the brutal pounding of desert racing.

"We have a huge amount of work to go," Whittaker said.