Despite two largely successful, well-run forays into motorsport’s top echelon, India will have to give F1 a miss in 2014, and help is needed for the future.
You normally wouldn’t have thought that the announcement of the Austrian Grand Prix’s return to the Formula 1 World Championship on July 23 this year would have anything to do with the Indian Grand Prix.
However, with the Russian GP already confirmed for 2014, the addition of Austria took the number of races up to 21. F1’s commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone has long maintained that he wanted to see 20 races on the calendar but for teams the expanding calendar carries many logistical and financial challenges. Especially since revenue sharing has long been a sticking point for them.
One race would have to go, and with reports of trouble for the German GP as well, it was assumed that Austria was being prepared as a replacement and India would be safe.
However, with raceday attendance dropping at the 2012 Indian GP, fears about the race’s future in the long term emerged.
Just prior to the Hungarian GP weekend though, a veteran F1 journalist blogged that the Indian GP’s future was indeed in doubt. In the follow up comments to his post, he mentioned how the bureaucratic hassles faced by F1 teams and drivers had started to wear thin on the ‘circus.’
The organizers and promoters of the circuit – Jaypee Sports – had faced their fair share of trouble as well in the run up to the extremely successful inaugural edition of the GP.
Things were much quieter in the build up to 2012, but, once again, the event ran smoothly amongst reports of trouble with various government officials and permissions required to stage the race.
Due to the Indian GP’s unique status among the new Asian venues of being a completely private undertaking, the hurdles were many for Jaypee Sports.
Motor sport (as of July 29 of this year) is not represented in the sports ministry’s list of recognized national sports federations.
This exempts the organizers of arguably India’s biggest international sporting event from any kind of tax relief despite Jaypee Sports agreeing to contribute Rs. 10 crore towards the national sports development fund every year for a period of ten years from 2011.
It should be noted that cricket’s governing body, the Board of Cricket Control in India, is not recognized by the sports ministry either, but due to being registered as a ‘charitable organization’ frequently gets a financial boost from tax exemptions. A little more baffling is how the sports ministry also recognizes the card game of bridge in its sporting federations list - but that is another matter.
On the surface of it, it seems like a wild digression to include the sports ministry in the issue of the 2014 Indian GP being dropped and shifted to March of 2015.
Especially since the matter of race hosting is normally one between F1’s promoters (Ecclestone and venture capital group CVC) and the Indian GP’s organizers, Jaypee Sports.
It has even been reported in motor sport magazine Autosport that among the teams and drivers who are required to pay tax on 1/19th of their annual revenue to Indian authorities, Formula One Management (headed by Ecclestone) is required to comply as well. This makes it seem like Ecclestone is putting his bank balance before India’s motorsport aspirations.
But with India’s economy in trouble, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to put the onus on making the path for a high profile international event that puts the National Capital Region in particular in the global spotlight a little easier as far as the government is concerned.
Jaypee Sport’s Sameer Gaur himself took to NDTV to appeal to the government to treat the Indian GP “like it’s their own event,” and even suggesting that it shares the licensing fee for the race and not just treat it as a “Jaypee event.”
Prominent Indian motorsport figures are privately of the opinion that, under the current circumstances, the Indian GP’s return in 2015 isn’t certain. And that won’t come as good news for the multitude of cab drivers who have been known to charge as much as `2,000 to take someone from Greater Noida’s Pari Chowk to the gates of the Buddh International Circuit (BIC) during GP time!
That light hearted example illustrates a fraction of the economic impact the event has on the region. Closer to motorsport itself is the leverage that drivers competing in non-F1 categories get when racing on the BIC.
The thought of that being denied to them, while a game of bridge is recognized as a sport just doesn’t add up.
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