(Force) What India!!!

Last week Vijay Mallya, owner of Force India denied that his team was up for sale and he is never selling it. A week later, Force India is now Sahara Force India with the Sahara Group taking over 42% stake in the team. This coming from a Member of Parliament in India and a business tycoon whose is involved heavily in the Liquor and Aviation. Force India has always had a reputation of paying vendors late and now this coming from the team owner is ridiculous.

Jordan F1 despite their limited budgets has always stood out from the rest of the teams and during the 1999 season, the team was actually in contention for the driver’s Championship! Imagine had Honda chosen Jordan ahead of BAR as its works team, things would have been different but unfortunately that did not happen and Jordan just declined and towards the end of its life was just ahead of Minardi the perennial back markers in F1.

Before Mallya took over the team, the team was initially know as Midlands and then Spyker took over the team before finally Mallya taking over and making it Force India. One thing had to be accepted, ever since Mallya took over the team has improved every other season and now is a consistent mid-field team which was what Jordan used to be in the late 90’s. Also unlike many other private teams, the team never had pay drivers and though drivers like Sutil does come with limited sponsorship while having di Resta would entitle them to some discount from engine suppliers Mercedes, but still both the drivers come with good pedigree and they deserve their seats.

Sahara investing in the team and taking over in an ideal world will be good for F1 but knowing Sahara and its patronage of cricket, this deal is not good in the long run for this team. The owner lied about the sale of stake and then there is no concrete plan for the future but the only thing we now know is that they wanted an Indian driver in the team. Even if the Indian driver is of the caliber of Sutil or Glock it would make sense but then they just need to look at Super Aguri when they decided to field drivers for the sake of nationality. We got the likes of Yuji Ide and Sakon Yamamoto; both do not deserve to be anywhere near a F1 track.

Currently we have 2 Indians in F1 in some form with Karthikeyan, who raced for the HRT for a few races and also their reserve driver while Chandok who managed a race with Team Lotus. Neither have done enough to justify a drive with Force India when the likes of Nico Hülkenberg who is without a drive after a more than decent debut season with Williams and has had a stellar junior formula career. The era of pay drivers is bad enough but now this era of fielding drivers for the sake of nationality is absurd. Ferrari has not fielded an Italian driver since Ivan Capelli in 1992 and the likes of Luca Badoer and Giancarlo Fisichella only got to drive because of Massa’s injury. Honda made a mistake of persisting with Sato for a very longtime and it did hurt them during the 2004 season when Button was the best for a non-Ferrari driver while Sato despite having the best car which was not a Ferrari could only finish 8^th.

Do we really need this?

The other aspect which has really shocked me was to see advertisements for Force India branded merchandise sold by Reebok having cricketers endorsing it. Is this not very absurd and the very brand is actually insulting a fan by doing this. Just because Dhoni is going to be on posters of Force India merchandise means that they are going to sell more t-shirts. Let Dhoni and the rest of the cricketers endorse the brand for their clubs but why the hell would you want a cricketer endorsing merchandise of different sport. Imagine KP endorsing McLaren merchandise!!!

For the sake of F1, we do not need cricketers promoting it as well the Bollywood stars hogging the limelight for cheap publicity. On top of all this the Indian government does not recognize this as a sport and calls it an entertainment. The current Indian government which is possibly the most corrupt in the world instead of using F1 as a tool to ensure that the process is well and good in India is now making life as much tough as possible for everyone involved. Do we really need this race? Only time will tell but I feel Indian GP is the new Turkish GP!!!