NK’s New Race

Narain Karthikeyan, India’s first Formula 1 driver, takes on a different role, at the head of his own racing team that is a serious contender in the ongoing national racing championships

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TEAM BOSS: Karthikeyan (extreme right) pitches in

Qualifying hasn’t gone well, one gear box seems possessed by an evil spirit, a clutch is throwing a tantrum, the team drivers are being instructed and interrogated, but Karthikeyan has called a time out. “Let them be. Now they just need to go out and drive.”

It is the second round of the 10th JK Tyre National Racing Championships. Speed NK Racing, Karthikeyan’s outfit, lead in the standings amongst 14 cars at the Kari Motor Speedway outside Coimbatore, in a place signposted by the local panchayat as the “classical, divine Tamil township of Chettipalayam.”

This is NK Racing’s second year in the championships, where they field two cars in the Formula Rolon Chevrolet class, the highest of the three classes involved. The other two are the Formula LGB Swift and the Formula LGB Hyundai.NK Racing’s drivers are Chennai teenagers Aditya Patel, 18, and Saran Vikram, 17, one the son of a former racer and the other of a garage mechanic. Two other drivers, Saahil Shelar from Mumbai and Ajay Kini from Chennai are part of the Amaron NK Racing Academy, and have been placed with the Chennai-based WSRF team for the Rolons.

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GREY AND GREEN: An NK Racing car in the JK Tyres National Championships

Kamlesh Patel, father of Aditya with three decades of racing behind him, says the two NK Racing drivers have a “two in a billion opportunity” to work with a driver of Karthikeyan’s experience.

India’s first Formula 1 driver is putting in the mandatory night shifts with race engineer and cousin Sanjay Balu and his team of 10 mechanics. They dissect drives in English and Tamil and stand over the cars as an open heart surgery is performed. Karthikeyan is in the mix measuring the track temperature, timing practice laps, the team always trying to squeeze just a bit more out of the car. “All you need to win,” says NK Racing team manager Yohann Setna, “is to be one hundredth of a second faster than the next guy.”

For the first time in his life, as a test driver for Williams F1, Karthikeyan, 30, is being paid to drive. There is a possibility of more F1 races. So why bother with 18-hour working days that do not guarantee that extra one-hundredth of a second? Karthikeyan says, “I wanted to start something in a small way, we had all the infrastructure in our workshop.” Until 12 years ago, a section of Perur Engineering Works, part of his father’s business, worked on cars the teenage rookie raced. Today that garage is buzzing again.

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ROOKIES: Patel (left) Shelar (bottom left) and Kini (right)

THE FORMULA ONE QUESTION

Karthikeyan’s Choice In Chettipalayam , Narain Karthikeyan was asked just one question. Would he take up The Offer? India’s first Formula One driver, now a test driver for Williams, has been approached by F1 team Spyker to race for them in the season’s last seven races. One of the lower-ranked teams on the F1 ladder, Spyker is familiar territory for Karthikeyan who raced with them in the 2005 season. Spyker is in fact the current incarnation of team Jordan, who signed Karthikeyan up for his F1 debut and for a brief period were also named Midland. Spkyer have recently sacked their German driver Christijan Albers and indicated their interest in the Indian. Karthikeyan is yet to take a decision on whether to return to a struggling team or keep the security of working with Williams. However due to new FIA rules, the time test drivers get on cars has been severely cut back. Karthikeyan says, “My racing instincts say I want to drive. After my experience as a tester at Williams, I think I can extract more out of an F-1 car now than I could.”

Karthikeyan has worked his network of contacts to get his team what it needs, like F1 lubricants from Castrol. With Balu, he teaches rookies how to log every detail of a drive into their memories to use as feedback.

Karthikeyan and Setna have designed a new easy-to-read set-up sheet for the pit team. The sheet logs the suspension and chassis set-up—tyre pressure, ride height/ ground clearance, angle of the tyres—which changes every time the car goes out, depending on the track surface and weather.

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IN THE MIX: Karthikeyan with driver Saran

The team was trimmed from four cars in the inaugural year to two and NK Racing estimates expenditure per car to touch Rs 10 lakh per season. Karthikeyan says, “The pressure to get the most out of two cars to get the wins is a lot more but management-wise two are much easier to handle”.

Of their drivers from the first year, Akhil Khushlani now races in the Formula BMW Asia series. Talks are on with the Tata Racing School to set up an academy, the country’s first proper racing institution, to run out of Chettipalayam three months at time.

The decision of India’s most famous driver, and most famous racing “brand”, to enter a team in the national championships should, you would imagine, be welcomed. But NK Racing faced some early sniping from envious opponents in season one.

It could be, says Setna, because the team was determined to look and act like professionals. The mechanics, who had worked on jeeps and trucks, were trained to work on race cars, split into specialist groups, like electricals and gearbox. Fitness regimes were drilled into the rookies and they were given books on driving and engineering. The pit signage had to be smart, the team used walkie talkies, and occasionally, pit-to-car communication.

Most importantly, the drives were free. It was the team and not the driver who found the sponsor to pay racing charges. (Over a six-round season, drivers must cough up Rs 35,000 for a Swift, Rs 45,000 for the Hyundai and Rs 1 lakh for the Rolon per round.) For contenders from non-racing families, it was a break from heaven. Shelar’s father Sanjay, a director in an engineering firm, says, “We have no tension about money, we don’t have to run around for sponsorship.”

As the race draws close, the pit gets calmer. The drivers are left to themselves, the engineers finish their job and leave it to the gods of the gearbox, and Karthikeyan heads off to watch. “Racing drivers... you need to treat them gently,” he says and he knows because at heart he is still one. In a sport about technology, aerodynamics and big bucks, the most precious part of a race car is still the driver, for whom spares are not easily found.

Along with dozens of sponsors’ stickers, NK Racing cars sport the words “Aditya B+ve” and “Saran B+ve”. They read like inspirational rev-up slogans, but are actually the drivers’ blood groups, mandatory on every race car. All race tracks must have an ambulance and a fire truck on standby.

On the weekend, nothing flammable catches fire, but Patel lights up. He finishes third in one race and wins the second, biding his time as two leaders engage in a charged skirmish. Before they have time to say, “Chettipalayam”, Patel slips past them on the inside.

Every race is a sensory overload, a blur of metal and rubber, the howl of engines, the smell of gas but this is almost a cerebral performance. It comes from a skinny kid who looks like he belongs in the quietest corner of a library. His team is going mental; engineers leap up and down, applauding mechanics pour over the pit wall.

Patel roars past the finish line and Karthikeyan smiles. It is not the smile seen on hoardings or on TV but a sunbeam at full throttle. He says, “Inside me, I’m really, happy I did this.”

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