Franco Aragones is not old enough to have a driver’s license.

Yet, he regularly accelerates to speeds reaching 200 mph.

The Coral Gables resident started racing cars – both Go Karts and Formula cars – when he was 3 years old. Now, at 15, he is the youngest qualifier for the Formula Renault 2.0 UK race, a result of a acing career thus far that any aspiring racecar driver would envy.

Out of 130 races he has competed in, he as won first place for 30 of them, second place for 25 and third place for 35.

“It’s all that I love about racing,” said Franco, a sophomore at Palmer Trinity School. “The adrenaline. How you’ve got to think about the racecar strategy. And I love the cars. I can do a corner doing 180 miles per hour. In a street car you can’t do that.”

The Formula Renault 2.0 UK race is scheduled to begin in April and will include 14 races until October at tracks around the United Kingdom.

Just like all other races he has competed in, Franco will once again be the youngest driver on the track.

The age for race car drivers usually varies between 17 and 25.

“They (race car drivers) are like, ‘There’s no way he is going to be able to drive this car.’” Franco said. “So I get in the car and win. They get impressed.”

Unlike any other race Franco has competed in, at the Formula Renault 2.0 UK he is responsible for a lot more than racing. With the help of one engineer, Franco is in charge of tuning his Formula Renault 2.0 racecar before each race, including adjusting the height of the car so it has more weight in the front, taking care of the tire pressure, adjusting the tires to get the right grip, or camber, and adjusting the angles of the wings in the back of the car so that he gets the right aerodynamics.

All this used to seem difficult for Franco. He started taking engineering lessons when he was 13 years old.

“I didn’t understand anything in the beginning,” he said in an interview at Palmer Trinity School, in Palmetto Bay. “There are some things that are very complicated.”

The UK-based Fortec Motorsports has sponsored Franco for the UK race.

The race is yet another step forward in Franco’s career which he began when he was 3 years old.

It was in Valle de Bravo, Mexico. His father – prototype-racer Rafael Aragones – took him to a Go Kart track.

“I loved it because I felt that I was going too fast but actually I was going 10 mph,” Franco said. “Every day I went with my dad and kept liking it.”

Then, three years ago he competed in his very first race in Cancun, Mexico. And, he won.

But he says he truly proved his skill at the Virginia International Raceway about a year ago when he started 24th, or last, and came up first by the end of the race. His race car had broken during the qualifying session, and he could not qualify for a better spot.

While he was fixing his car, he also mapped out his strategy to gain ground on the other competitors.

“It was a really tough race. All the strategy I had to think about,” he said. “I started at 24th place, and I won the race.”

Nothing seems to stump Franco who is aiming high for his future as he plans to get a mechanical engineering degree to supplement his knowledge about cars and his racing career.

“I want to be the best Formula 1 driver,” he said. “And the youngest.”