National pride and sport are inherently intertwined. Vinayak hopes that the same doesn’t apply to shame & scandal.
As the Sahara Force India team embarked on its tenth season in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship this year, I couldn’t help but think back to all the lofty promises the team’s flamboyant boss Vijay Mallya made during a very loud and glitzy launch way back in 2008. I was less than a year into covering motorsport for a living, and, like many motorsport fans in India, I was optimistic about the chances of the team given that its foundations lay in what was previously the Jordan team. The assumption was, with enough funding, they could become contenders again.
It was easy to get starry-eyed as the Gateway of India in Mumbai was turned into a platform to launch “India’s team.” Of course, the only thing Indian in the team ever since the launch has been the owner and team principal, nothing more really.
Any possibility of the much improved (since his 2005 F1 debut) Narain Karthikeyan being a part of India’s team was dismissed by Mallya – this is despite the fact that Narain had been proving himself in the very competitive A1 GP series and had previously proved himself at the Formula 3 level. Till date, no Indian engineer has ever been present at the team, either as an apprentice, a member of the race team, or at the team’s factory.
There were lofty promises, though – of the team consistently scoring points (they ended up with none in 2008), and of Force India being on the podium of the 2010 Indian Grand Prix with an Indian driver. Well, those didn’t quite pan out! To the team and Mallya’s credit, though, the right deals were made from 2009 onwards, which have ensured a good level of competitiveness in the midfield – and even a podium since the start of the hybrid power unit era in 2014. But there were no podiums from a shock second place at Spa in 2009 all the way to 2013. No Force India driver was seen on the podium of any of the three Indian GPs held between 2011 and 2013, let alone an Indian driver.
Again, to Mallya’s credit, he addressed this through his ‘One in a billion’ talent hunt, through which Sahara Force India managed to find Jehan Daruvala – who has made a solid start at the highly competitive European Formula 3 level.
Sadly, however, all of the team’s achievements invariably get overshadowed by the improprieties of its two Indian owners – Subrata Roy and Mallya himself.
Roy has been in prison since 2014, prior to which the Sahara Group had its fair share of financial headaches, while Mallya made headlines for all the wrong reasons for the failure of Kingfisher Airlines and the massive loans from public sector banks that he has defaulted on. As much as he would like to dismiss all of this as “Indian media hype,” the law is slowly catching up to him.
An exile from India, Mallya’s arrest in London could lead to extradition and a forced return to India where he would be answerable to the Indian government. I’m not sure how Indian motorsport fans are supposed to take pride in any of this.
Surely CS Santosh, TVS Racing, Hero MotoSports, Gaurav Gill in rallying and Mahindra’s efforts in Moto3 and Formula E are far more a source of pride for motorsport followers in India – and no hint of the taint of controversy yet either. And if Mallya and Roy’s current trouble leads to them selling their joint 85 percent stake in Sahara Force India, how badly would it hurt India’s reputation in the world of F1? Perhaps not much, as there wasn’t a lot Indian about it in the first place.
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