The Meteoric Rise of Pragathi Gowda

With the FIA Asia-Pacific Rally Championship (APRC) kicking off this weekend in India, The Hairpin.Co caught up with Pragathi Gowda, a Rally car driver from Bengaluru who has been causing quite a positive stir in the motorsport world through her sensational driving. Having won the Indian National Gymkhana Championship in 2019 and the Junior Indian National Rally Championship in 2022, she quickly became a force to be reckoned with. Within a period of 4 years, she had cemented her name in Indian motorsports and took the country to the FIA Rally Star program, in which she finished runner-up.

Her “meteoric rise” as we called it, was not overnight although it may seem to be on the outside. As a child, she knew that she always wanted to do something with automobiles but didn’t know that becoming a racer was possible. Eventually, as children of the social age, she found her answer on Instagram at the right time and age. “On Instagram, I came across one of the autocross events. So I just said I want to take part and I came first in that event and from there on, I said I want to be good at it and I was so natural. People have been there in the past 10-15 years, but I went there for the first time and I could be first and I thought, okay, I have the potential and if I channelize it in the right way, I think I'll be there.”

Of course, as an Indian, this is not a conventional path that people follow. So much so that she had to tear a page out of the old handbook of talented individuals, “I started lying to my family saying, okay, I'll just go out for a party, I'll go on a vacation and I just started entering events. Every event I went to, I kept on winning and I performed really well and they see some potential and they see some talent there.”

Despite her parents being against her racing career at first, having lost her brother in a road accident earlier as well as the belief that motorsport is a dangerous sport, her natural ability to adapt, strategize, and overcome yielded results they simply could not ignore. The more the victories came, the more Pragathi had the incentive to educate her parents on the safety precautions that the FIA and FMSCI have taken to make the races safe for the drivers.

Every driver in motorsport has a person or people they look up to as heroes. Unlike most drivers, Pragathi’s biggest motivator is her late brother, Prajval. “I made to myself the day I lost my brother because he saw the potential in me and it was him who was always pushing me. But I don't have that person with me right now. But I have the words, he's always in me. So that's what I believe. So that keeps me pushing day in and out.” She also attributes her father being her biggest inspiration because of the mentality he brought her up with. “(..) Right from my childhood, they never treated me like a girl and they never treated my brother like a boy because they've always been equal to us. No matter what I say, I said I want to ride a bike. They said, OK, you can ride and they got me a bike. I just started riding. So it was always equal.”

While Pragathi was brought up with the mindset that she was no different from her brother, it isn’t a value inherently engrained in competitors to accept her as one among them. Motorsports was, is, and will continue to remain a male-dominant sporting space in the foreseeable future. However, the sport is more accepting of female racing drivers now, but we have a long road to go before calling it the norm. When she started winning in mixed gender grids, some of the reactions she got were typical- “’How are you driving like this? How come you're beating us? Oh, my God, I just can't believe this. Oh, man, she's coming. We have to go faster. We have to do something.’”, a panic and fret that would go onto deter them from their own goals while Pragathi remained unfazed.

She carried the same mentality through her championships and rally wins despite hearing discouraging words along the way. Her only mantra: “Never give up.”

Her persistence was rewarded with the FIA Rally Star coming to India, an opportunity she would not let go of. Since it had never happened before, her determination and skill got her to the finale, becoming the first Indian to do so. A program designed to reduce the entry barrier to rallying and find new talent to develop, the FIA Rally Star was also the means through which Pragathi got her first taste of international rallying, which she contrasted with Indian motorsport with clarity.

One of the main differences was the systematic process followed, from registration to the reflex, physical, and mental strengthening tests and driving runs. The routine she adopted there has been a constant even when she is competing locally or nationally as she believes it helps her prepare and perform better. The other points she touched on were based on lived experience, “(..) People love motorsport. They live day in and out for motorsports and they do anything for motorsports. When that's the case, the exposure is more. And the technology is advanced there. And rally cars, we buy a street car and change it into a rally car, but there they build a specified rally car that's absolutely for rallying. So in that term, it's more reliable and it's more strong.”

Pragathi’s steep climb up the motorsport ladder is unprecedented and it’s an experience that needs to be shared, so coming back to the rallying in the country, she said “After what I experienced there, I came back and I told all my people here in the Rally fraternity, “No, this is not how we're supposed to do”, “Can we change this? Can we do this? Can we bring this change? Can we kind of develop things?” And within my team, MRF and Siddhant, we have a team, we have two drivers. So I kind of helped him or her to kind of understand what I went through. And they're all very curious, they definitely want to know because they all want to be there one day.”

Coming back for a double stint in the Indian National Rally Championship and the Asia Pacific Rally Championship in 2024, Pragathi continues to be grateful for the near taste of victory at an international level while being very focused on the job at hand. Her supporters, most importantly the director of Sidvin, Mohan Nagarajan, one of the most influential people in her career and a rally enthusiast, even representing India at the WRC level, have guided her for the past year. He has also put her under mental coaching and physical strengthening classes at Sports Dynamics in Chennai. 

This weekend, she will be behind the wheel of a 300-horsepower, four-wheel drive Subaru, which she mentioned is coming down to India for the first time in the modern day of motorsports as we know it. With Karamjit Singh, a multiple-time WRC winner, training her as a driver coach, her journey to reach the top of the mountain of rally, WRC, continues.

Motorsports, unlike most other sports, has unpredictability in its DNA. In a sport where the driver and machine become one and work in tandem to achieve the maximum, the unpredictability is shared; on one end someone wins, and on the other, someone loses. Pragathi’s best advice came from a multiple-time Dakar winner who told her “When you win, you learn nothing. When you lose, you learn a lot. So don’t be scared to lose.”.