"If their talent takes them to Formula 1, we take them all the way to Formula 1"

“If their talent takes them to Formula 1, we take them all the way to Formula 1”, said Aditya Patel, one of the co-founders of Racing Promotions Pvt Ltd (RPPL), promoters of the Indian Racing League and F4 Indian Championship. It’s a statement that sounds like music to many fans, enthusiasts, drivers, and people of Indian motorsport waiting for a visionary to nudge growth in Indian motorsport.

Akhil Puthiyedath Photography 

Over the last few weeks, I travelled with Aditya’s team as they put up a brave challenge to invite as many amateur racing drivers across the country to an open karting event as possible. The aim was simple: create an open, accessible, affordable racing championship to find the best drivers and create a pathway for their growth in motorsport.

The event attracted 2,500 registrations across six cities for the ultimate prize pool: a fully sponsored drive at the FMSCI-Rotax Max National Championship — India’s highest tier of kart racing. RPPL’s quest to find five of the fastest drivers came to a close at the Hyderabad round 2 weeks ago, where, after six weeks of racing, they found their champions who will receive a scholarship to take the first step of their racing careers.

After the success of the event, I sat down with Aditya to understand the bigger picture —

Akhil Puthiyedath Photography 

Building a ladder in motorsport is an important endeavour that ensures continued engagement with up-and-coming racing drivers and provides them with a platform to discover their strengths cost-effectively.

“If you’re a parent, you’re going to engage your child in something serious; you want to see a certain roadmap for them. India has not been able to provide that in the past. So, it’s just the very odd few like the Mainis (Arjun and Kush Maini’s family) and Daruvalas (Jehan Daruvala’s family) who’ve got into the sport and have taken it forward,” says Aditya, succinctly summarizing a problem that has caught out many in the formation years of global motorsport in India.

A solution to the problem requires time and effort, but most importantly, it needs the right backers for the first step — which is what team RPPL has set out to do: build an ecosystem within India to foster racing talent on and off track. Enter: The Indian Racing League and Formula 4.

Sanjay Krishna for the Indian Racing League on Behance

“The goal with Indian Racing League is to make it an aspirational form of motorsports where a driver can look to IRL as a way upward. We’re not changing too much from what we’ve done before — obviously, we are looking at the possibility of doing more street circuits. As far as the format and drivers go, we’re more or less sticking to the same group. The foreign drivers won’t change very much and the Indian drivers — we’ll have more in the draft, we’ll bring in more teams, more team owners, and build on it on that perspective.

“As for the F4 championship, we need our own little pathway to F1 within the country because the path to racing is very expensive. Even if you look at the F4 UAE championship, you’re paying European prices to race in the F4 UAE; they’re paying upwards of EUR/USD 200,000.”

Image: MP Motorsport

The IRL and F4 championships in India provide unprecedented access to motorsport beyond karting, an important piece of the puzzle to develop as the global sport sways to the East with greater investment. But the buck does not stop there for RPPL. Their focus is on building an entire ecosystem that feeds itself and positions India as a destination to attract the attention necessary to find India’s next F1 driver and eventually the first F1 world champion from India. This starts by tapping into the young STEM crowd in college:

“The idea is not to bring in an already-F1 engineer, but to bring in the best of the rest from different colleges and put them together in a space so they can work with teams like MP Motorsport and other teams that are going to be running our cars. We’ll have an exchange program with MP (Motorsport) where the students go to Europe to work with the team over there. Eventually, what that does is it helps to grow our own ecosystem. This year, it may be new and people may be sceptical about getting into the program, but once someone sees results and sees that someone that did this program is a full-fledged race engineer and made a career out of it, then more and more people will start.”

RPPL’s proposed ecosystem with the entry of the Formula Regional Indian Championship next season looks something like this:

India is not new to motorsports and it would be wrong to assume that there is any love lost since the golden days. With changing consumer behaviour, greater awareness about different forms of motorsport, and increasing investment in sportstech and sportsinfra, there is a nudge to revamp and reintroduce what we already know while preparing to scale up the nation’s interest to play with the big guys in the sport. RPPL is leading the charge in that very direction at the right time.