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SPORTS: FORMULA ONE RACING
Walk Between Life And Death
The real business
is negotiating the car through a maze of machines, looking for the opening
to overtake, working out the most precise line with which to take a tricky
corner, all the time keeping an eye in the rear-view mirror for the man
behind. He could be craftier, he could be quicker, he could be crazier.
Race car driving is the walk on the fine line between calculation and
creativity, inspiration and insanity, the walk sometimes between life
and death. Or as former world champion Graham Hill, father of Damon Hill,
put it, "like balancing an egg on a spoon while shooting the rapids".
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Speed merchant: Karthikeyan
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From the moment he watched a video of the 1989
Formula One World Championship season as a 12-year-old in Coimbatore,
Karthikeyan has chased his impossible dream: "For me it was always
Formula One or nothing." Nothing was always an easier option. Do
you know what it's going to cost, his father G. Karthikeyan would ask
and the son would say he would find the sponsors. Who's going to give
money to a 16-year-old nobody? Someone. Don't you know Indians only race
and rally at home? Not this one. "To be honest, if we'd been given
a choice, we wanted him to do his MBA and join the family business in
textiles," says his father. "We've learnt from him about attitude."
Initially the family indulged their second child,
though his mother Sheela is still too anxious to watch him race. Narain
has an elder sister Deepika who he says understands him best and a younger
brother Rajeev who has no love for race cars. His father first built the
nine-year-old a go-kart using a 50 cc moped engine and paid $8,000 (around
Rs 3.5 lakh) to enrol him in prestigious Elf-Winfield at the age of 16.
Once the coaches-who had seen Alain Prost, Alesi and Damon Hill drive
in their youth-told the Indian family that this was a special talent,
Karthikeyan's dream went into overdrive.
To compete a driver has to pay a team to sign
him on. The sums begin at Rs 30,000 per race for the Indian Formula Maruti
to Rs 60 lakh per year for a Formula Asia Car, £3,50,000 pounds
(Rs 2.3 crore) a year for the Formula 3 class in Britain and $1.2 million
(Rs 5.5 crore) in Formula Nippon. Karthikeyan's current ride with Formula
Nippon team excite Team Impul has been subsidised because of his past
results. But he still has to pay $3,00,000 for the ride, the expenses
now taken care by his sponsors, including Kingfisher, JK Tyres, Ford India,
which stepped in two years ago, Amaron and for the first time, to everyone's
amusement, a clothing company called Triad. Only when a driver graduates
to Formula One does he get paid for the privilege of driving.
In 1995, the first year Karthikeyan raced in
Formula Asia, it was in a second-hand car, his team consisting of one
engineer, no spare engine or spare gear box. "I look back now and
think it was ridiculous," says his father. But he put bigger teams
to shame. It was his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. "When
I went to England as Formula Asia Champion, they said so what? It means
nothing."
 In
1999, Karthikeyan raced for Carlin Motorsport set up by Martin Stone and
Trevor Carlin and Vicky Chandok, a friend of Karthikeyan's family and
head of the Wallace Sports and Research Foundation, an arm of JK Tyres
involved with R&D in motor sport technology. He beat current F1 drivers
Jenson Button and Luciano Burti and finished sixth overall, winning two
races in England, another first for an Indian. Pushed by Ford India, he
was able to move on to the high-profile Stewart Racing (the F3 arm of
Jaguar) with whom he shared mixed luck and mixed vibes in 2000, finishing
fourth overall. Ford India MD Phil Spender says, "Indian drivers
are an unknown quantity in Europe but Narain's been pioneering in that
way."
Sanjay Sharma, head of JK Tyres Motor Sports
division, says Karthikeyan's success has changed the way the world of
motor sport looks at an Indian drivers. "They look at us now and
say, oh Indian team-Narain!" Parthiva Sureshwaran, 20, who has graduated
from the Formula Asia series, now races for ME Motorsport in F3 in the
UK. Karun Chandok, 18, won all his first four Asian Formula 2000 races
in his maiden season. Of the top four places in the current Asian Formula
2000, three are held by Indian drivers, Chandok, Asif Nazir and Kaushik
Harita.
Which way Narain Karthikeyan's career goes from
this day on is immaterial. In the history books he will always be the
boy who dared. The one who stood at the lip of a great chasm and looked
not below but ahead. And leaped.
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