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SPORTS: FORMULA ONE RACING
First Ride Of His Life
Narain Karthikeyan has been driving fast for the past
eight years but this was his most important test ever
By Sharda Ugra in Silverstone
He
inched out of a melee of engineers and mechanics clad in a famous deep
green, out from a jungle of wires, cables, car parts and computer equipment,
out over the boundaries that separate the impossible from the possible.
One cautious but steady right turn out of the Jaguar Racing Formula One
garage at a racetrack called Silverstone, in the UK, under the kind of
sun that warms his home town of Coimbatore, and Narain Karthikeyan had
driven straight into the pages of Indian sporting history.
 Being
the first Indian to drive an F1 car is like being the first Indian to
step on the moon. Every steering wheel costs $25,000 (Rs 11.5 lakh), team
budgets flutter at $80-100 million (Rs 368-460 crore) a year, Porsches
and Ferraris ease their way past giant lorries that carry the race equipment
around the world and diners in the hospitality "motor homes"
recall meetings with the late King Hussain of Jordan and discuss the benefits
of signing up popstar Robbie Williams for some Grand Prix publicity.
It is not a world for timid spenders or weak
hearts. It is a world dominated by European wealth and tradition. The
way in is through a very strongly guarded door. Karthikeyan, India's most
successful race driver whose helmet carries the blue "chakra"
of the Indian flag on its crown, has got a foot in. "Narain's obviously
got the talent and it's a significant day for him. So far it's gone well,"
remarked Bobby Rahal, CEO and Team Principal of Jaguar Racing.
Rahal exudes the aura of glamour and high technology
that is F1, the very peak of the motor racing world. It can intimidate
any outsider, why only a first-time test driver: a few rows down from
the Jaguar "paddock" where Karthikeyan ate cereal for breakfast
before the test, so did world champion Michael Schumacher and his closest
competitor, the Finn Mika Hakkinen. Just before he pulled out for the
first time ever in a F1 car, the vehicle that exited before him belonged
to veteran driver Jean Alesi.
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NO LIMITS: Karthikeyan is aiming to become one of the 22 who get
to drive F1 cars
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But Karthikeyan, 24, an incongruous wisp of a
figure amidst heavy machinery, has spent more than eight years in motor
racing and knows where everything finally comes to a head: behind the
wheel of a machine only 22 men in the world are allowed to race, on tracks
that test ability and nerve and strength. In F1 testing, there are no
rehearsals, no simulations. All a test driver can do is get briefed, get
in, sit down and drive. The car is connected in no less than 100 places
to computers in a hushed, air-conditioned it truck back in the paddock
that monitors every change in the car. That is all that is silent about
the science.
When an F1 engine revs up, it is as though an
angry beast were beginning to howl at being caged. Once on the track there
is a gunshot of defiance when it shifts down a gear to take a corner and
the scream down the straights is every driver and team's call to attention.
A few laps around Silverstone and Karthikeyan's Jaguar-a 2000 model-was
howling, shooting and screaming with the rest of them.
An F1 test though is not merely about flamboyance
and speed. "We don't want him to be breaking world records in a test,
it's not about that," said Jaguar Racing spokesman Nav Sidhu, a British
Asian who moved to the team six months ago. "It is about the smoothness
with which he drives, how quickly he adapts and most importantly how well
he understands the machine. Everything that Narain does today will be
noticed, not just by our guys, but by everyone in every pit. If people
want to know how he did, they'll give us a call," Sidhu told india
today.
The business of getting just a test drive with
a F1 car is linked with networking, management and contacts. Karthikeyan's
current test was part of a contractual agreement leveraged by one of his
sponsors, Ford India, when he signed on with Stewart Racing (an arm of
Jaguar Racing) in the F3 season in 2000 after coming up through the ranks
in Asia. Karthikeyan's manager Steve Robinson who manages F1 phenomenon
Kimi Raikkonen told India Today, "We aim to have Narain into a Formula
One team-if not to drive then definitely a test drive by the next season."
The "Formula" refers to the specifications
and regulations-minimum weight, size, engine displacement, among others-used
to categorise single-seaters race cars in a world inhabited by engineers
wearing oversized headphones and earmuffs, smouldering women in spandex
carrying umbrellas (genus: "Pit Babes"), scuttling pit crew
and adoring fans.
Racing a Formula machine is not like a Sunday
spin in your Zen. A driver sits in a single seater like you would in a
tub, legs stretched out, his feet ready to tap dance on the accelerator
and brake pedals, upper body and arms ready to absorb the kind of non-stop
bone-jarring impact that Lennox Lewis could inflict for two long hours.
Cars scream down the track at 300 kmph and then brake for corners at 40
kmph before stepping on the gas again. The sudden acceleration could snap
your neck and it creates G-forces (the force exerted by gravity) that
fighter pilots deal with. "You can face up to 4.5 Gs in some races,"
says Karthikeyan. That is four and a half times your body weight bearing
down on you so that moving a finger is like lifting a barbell. Karthikeyan
weighs in at 55 kg ("it's not a handicap, Alain Prost was world champion
and he only weighed about 60 kg") and admits he was not one for pumping
weights but quickly hired a personal trainer, Gerry Convey, a few years
into pro racing.
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