In 2011,when a crowd of one lakh flocked to the outskirts of Greater Noida to watch Sebastian Vettel win the inaugural Indian Grand Prix,it promised to be the start of a most unlikely partnership: F1 and India,Red Bull and Prancing Horse against a backdrop of,among other things,bullock carts.
It looked like we had a race with character,just like Monaco,only the opposite of it. This notion further gained credibility in December that year when FIAs awards nite was held not in Monaco but in Gurgaon,and the Buddh International Circuit won the best F1 track prize. Formula One,back then,looked like it was here to stay.
However,in a sport where,as the cliché goes,split seconds count,two years is a long time. The third Indian GP is upon us but you will be forgiven if you have failed to notice it.
The hordes of spectators are gone,as the adjacent report explains,and Bernie Ecclestone and race promoters,JPSI,arent smitten by each other anymore. There wont be a race here next year and while JPSI insist it will be back in 2015 as they have a contract of five races,2013 may well be the last.
To begin with,F1 contracts arent set in stone. What the silver-haired,little big man says is what matters.
If he now deems the Indian GP to be too political (having ironically had no problem when Mayawati handed the trophy over to Vettel in 2011),and therefore a nuisance,then it will be excluded.
But this is the thing; the decision to not have a race in 2014 hasnt been taken on a whim. There were contentious issues lurking below the surface all along. One of them was the $45 million license fee that JPSI has to pay F1 for holding each edition of the race. The promoters wanted to pay less. Bernie,who always has other options queued up,was refusing to budge. Things came to a head.
Then there was the issue of a tax on teams. The Indian government levies a 70 percent tax on 1/19th of the revenue that an F1 team generates.
With their escalating costs and small profits,the teams understandably resent it. Added to this the massive depreciation in the rupee in recent months means what JPSI are going to have to pay F1 and what teams are set to pay as tax to the Indian government have increased by a steep 30 percent.
This,together with the fact that once a GP is scrapped its unlikely to be reinstated soon,makes the likely future of the Indian GP more uncertain than its made to appear. Grand Prix tracks in Argentina,Portugal,France,Turkey,South Africa and San Marino are some that are no longer part of the calendar. India,at the moment,seems headed in that direction.
Daksh is a special correspondent based in Delhi
daksh.panwar@expressindia.com
