The word 赛车 is formed by combining two meaningful characters: 赛 (sài), which means "to compete" or "to race", and 车 (chē), which means "vehicle" or "car". Together, they create a compound idea where the first character describes the action or purpose applied to the object of the second character. It conceptually fuses "racing" and "vehicle" to denote either a "racing car" (the machine) or the sport of "car racing" (the activity), with the specific meaning determined by context.