Racing game....

I'm going to take it easy for a first project and try and use all the basic information supplied in SDK and TDN tutorials. I first of all planned to make a basic -yet worthwhile- platform game. But there are many bugs and little problems involved in a game like this.

I've decided to make a racing game at a plan view, Kinda just like the scroller Tutorial except vertical. I just have a couple of major questions.

1) How can I create the player car go from an initial speed of zero to a maximum speed with a graduall build up? Simply saying, how can I make the player increase it's speed as you hold down the up arrow?

2) How would you create a placement gui? For example 2nd place, and how would I script these actions whenever he takes over an enmy car like going from 2nd to 1st and display this?

Thanks, Ryan