The Indian F1 fiasco

“We have received a letter in this regard from Bernie Ecclestone. The IOA [Indian Olympic Association] will be the promoter, the first event will be held in 2009.” With these words, IOA president Suresh Kalmadi got India’s long-held Formula 1 aspirations off the block – or into another interminable dream sequence, since Ecclestone, CEO of the Formula One Group, has been holding out the F1 carrot to India for a half-decade, at least. Ecclestone has long been one of the F1 administration’s deftest at stoking ambition and keeping it stoked just so.

Kalmadi’s ambitions are lavish but his reach has always been tethered to senior politicos who would rather float in anchorage. It must be frustrating. So when he assures us that virtually everything is settled, we know that absolutely nothing is. For instance, one of the cardinal terms of Ecclestone’s contract is that the IOA be entirely and solely responsible for financing the promotion and conduct of the race. Another condition is that the IOA must identify the land for the circuit in consultation with FOA (Formula One Administration) Ltd, with FOA partner Tilke Associates having a final say in the matter. The letter in Kalmadi’s hand is also a disclaimer. Neither in its text nor in its brandishing does it announce that it constitutes an offer that is capable of acceptance; and it is not legally binding. (The letter also effectively negates the recent proposal by liquor baron and motorsport aficionado Vijay Mallya to host a street race around India Gate.)

Every comma and clause in the contract has to have the FOA’s Olympian approval. The IOA must meet a race promotion contract with the FOA. The IOA must settle the commercial issues, the fee, security inputs, and the costs of national and international TV organisations. Also requiring Kalmadi’s compliance will be a circuit rights agreement with APM Sport (Ireland), an FOA affiliate that is - intriguingly - a "single-member private company limited by shares", regarding trackside advertising, title sponsorship, hospitality, vending and exhibition, pouring rights, and official programme and event merchandising rights.

The upside is that if India were somehow to meet the uncompromising demands of the Formula One Management (FOM), the Indian F1 could become the fifth new venue to be added to the calendar in recent months. Valencia and Singapore have signed on for races in 2008, Abu Dhabi in 2009, and South Korea in 2010.

The downside is that in the overfull F1 calendar, India can only come in as a replacement for a retiree. Silverstone might fall off the map when its contract ends in 2009 and were Ecclestone to lose all patience with the circuit’s insufficient upgrades, but the financial stakes are so mindbendingly huge that Silverstone is still gamely trying to keep its place; if it surrenders its place, Abu Dhabi will slot into it. Whose place will India take?

Ecclestone likes to keep his options open till the last moment, which is why the diminutive 76-year-old has provisionally signed on more than 10 nations for new F1 circuits. India is just one of them, and probably the least prepared in everything but the machinery of bombast.

Furthermore, we’ll get to know for sure only in late 2008 if India is in. The F1’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), usually doesn’t publish even a provisional calendar until the October of the year previous to a race season.

This is hardly the stuff of optimism nourishment. There’s more to F1 than watching balloon-tyred needles decked out in the motley of million-dollar advertising patches belting down straights at 300 mph; there’s the migraine of massive organisational vicissitudes, of being part of a scheme of a financial scheme so epic that it is almost mystical – none of which Indian administration has shown itself good at.

What India is great at is giving politicians with giant egos the wherewithal to trade punches in the boxing ring of national ambitions. Suresh Kalmadi and Union Minister for Sports Mani Shankar Aiyar have long been at loggerheads; it came to a head recently when Aiyar helped deflate Kalmadi’s attempt to rope in the 2014 Asian Games for New Delhi by grousing that he would rather see the money that might be coffered for the Asian Games be spent on development. That’s not an argument the Indian government will usually cavil at, but the gripe’s mistimed cue gifted the Asian Games to Incheon.

Formula 1 for India seems to be Kalmadi’s way of getting back at Aiyar. Aiyar, who is usually headlong in his opinions, has yet to huff about Kalmadi’s F1 hand-rubbing, which is unusually good for Kalmadi. The word is that Aiyar has been asked by his seniors in the Congress party to hold his peace, at least till the storm over his Asian Games lemon fades into the rowdy harmonics of Indian politics.

The problem is that Kalmadi is pretty much a stranger to the niceties – and the not-so-niceties – of organisation on the scale of Genghis Khan’s army. Purely in terms of logistics before a race, and given that all other issues have been settled to the refractory satisfaction of Bernie Ecclestone, seven aircraft have to be cleared through customs within an hour. After a race, equipment and cars have to be shoehorned into the same aircraft within two hours. The airport bureaucracy has to be as fast on its feet as the F1 drivers are off theirs. This is probably the reason why the Sepang International F1 Circuit is part of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) project. The KLIA project, which is managed by the Malaysian airline, Berhad, owns both the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and the Formula 1 racing circuit.

As Vicky Chandhok, Indian motorsports big-leaguer and father of Karun Chandhok, said on July 28, 2003 (http://www.rediff.com/sports/2003/jul/28chandhok.htm)

Mr Ecclestone was very, very clear when he sent Michael Taub as an intermediary...that it is not just a racing track that we are going to have but also various industries, industrial parks, etc, to make it commercially viable. The economics of having just a race track will not work. Today, India is looked at as a high-tech country. Several IT industries and vehicle manufacturers have come in here. And Formula One is the only sport that is technology driven. So it makes logical sense to have Formula One racing also in India…

[But] Formula One is not just 20 cars. These cars arrive in seven jumbo jets carrying all the equipment. The production company comes in three large aircraft with a staff of about 300-400 people. The security staff is the same world over. They fly from one venue to the other.

After landing, the seven aircraft have to clear through the customs within an hour. Two hours after the race, all the equipment and cars are packed into the aircraft and they leave. In a country like India, this is not going to be easy. Look at what all we need. We need support from the immigration, from customs...

When asked whether he thought that Ecclestone was aware of “problems”, Chandok said:

I don't think he is aware of these Indian problems in the form of delays. He cannot afford the delays. But before he says yes, he will actually fly an aircraft with all the equipment and do a mock run. He did that in China. That is why he is so keen on a place near the airport runway. Both in Hyderabad and Bangalore, they have offered land close to the airports. I must tell you the Formula One management has so far not made any official visit to India.

This does mean that if Ecclestone jinks an eyebrow, Delhi will have to scrabble for land near the Indira Gandhi International Airport at Palam or else build a circuit at Greater Noida, which is part of Uttar Pradesh in terms of state munificence but falls within the ambit of the National Capital Region. In any case, with the land bit yet to be settled, even Kalmadi conceded that the agreement was preliminary and conditional on a venue being approved.

And, a decade and some after Chandok Sr’s interview, Ecclestone did visit India recently to size up, of all places, Rajpath in New Delhi as a site for Formula 1 races, courtesy the ineffable persuasiveness of Vijay Mallya. It came to naught, of course – Rajpath falls under New Delhi’s stringent heritage protection laws; also, races even once a year would balls-up traffic so badly that not even the Capital’s citizenry, which is indignant but usually accepting of the imperiousness of VIP road-hogging, would have taken it.

At the bottom of the F1 pile is money, shitloads of it. India can scarce afford to pump in millions of dollars, megawatts of energy and rivers of sweat, all from a polity that will already be stripping itself of a great deal of developmental logic to feed the leviathan maw of the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Tellingly, after Ecclestone recently patted Istanbul Park, which has been contracted for MotoGP till 2021, as being “the best race course in the world”, Istanbul’s Chamber of Commerce’s chairperson, Murat Yalcintas, confessed that the circuit, and the Turkish GP, has so far lost “millions of dollars”.

Furthermore, each track that wishes to hold an F1 MotoGP will most likely have to sign at least a half-decade contract and pay US$ 8 million (approximately Rs 32 crore, at the going rate) a race. These costs are hardly something that Kalmadi – and his political bosses – would be willing to look full on. Even if he is personally out of the woods, in that he might have long departed the political scene when cumulative losses begin to turn the government of the day purple in the face, it’s a good bet that the Congress today will think a dozen times – which is 11 times more than it normally does – before it sends “Yes, bending over” signals to Ecclestone.