A nostalgic look back at the birthplace of Indian motorsport
Six a.m., Madras. The very end of the fleeting winter. The air feels cool and crisp. Best of all, it’s Sunday. The first Sunday of February, to be precise. Time to go watch racing!
In Sholavaram, an airstrip at Red Hills, about 25 km from the city, the air thrums with the glorious sound of performance engines. The day will be hectic; hundreds of racing cars and motorcycles will be wrung out thoroughly. Vicky Chandhok, famous racing and rally driver (though yet to become famous as Karun Chandhok’s father — yes, this a flashback) is bustling about. His Formula 2 car is one of the fastest, hitting as much as 250 kmph during races. He wonders if his usual friends and nemeses — Vijay Mallya with his Ensign F1, Karivardhan in his ‘Black Beauty’, the Maharaja of Gondal in his F5000, Ajit Thomas in his Chevron F3 — will put one over him. Not a chance, he thinks to himself.
***
Young Subhash Chandra Bose has been up really early. He smiles as he skims the morning newspaper. There’s a picture of his motorcycle, the number 5 Yamaha TZ; the caption says, “Can anyone beat Bose this year?” He’s a proud man, but not arrogant. His father allowed him to go racing as soon as he had popped the question. A couple of races into the sport, he was flying. He’s already a legend at Sholavaram.
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Back in Madras, Indu Chandhok, Vicky’s father is a happy man. His son is doing rather well in the races. The Madras Motor Sports Club, an organisation that grew along with, and because of him, is doing well too. The races are popular and the line of succession looks strong and stable. Ahead, there’s a tremendous day out with the family and the racers and his club friends at Sholavaram. Life couldn’t possible get better than this.
***
Jaikumar, a college student, rushes through his routine. His friends will be waiting; he hopes they’ve got tickets. The race is now sold out, and black-market tickets are all that are available. Jaikumar and his friends wait for the bus; the government is running Sholavaram Specials. There are families all around, complete with picnic gear, bawling kids, slightly bewildered wives and excited-looking husbands. The traffic on the narrow roads to Sholavaram will swell to epic proportion, as something like 30,000 people funnel into the small airfield.
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These are but four figures of a cast of thousands who saw and took part in motorsport in an era India hadn’t seen before and or since. Sholavaram and the All India Motor Race Meet (AIMRM) was the pinnacle of Indian hobby racing from the mid-50s to the early 90s, when the arrival of the Sriperumbudur track flicked it into recession as racing got altogether more serious and result-oriented.
A full 30 years later, the place couldn’t possibly be more underwhelming.
I smile at the statue of the (original) Subhash Chandra Bose when I turn off the highway. Four clicks later, I spot the now-leonine head of the boy named after the freedom fighter. Bose is waiting patiently so he can direct us on to the airstrip.
Say “Sholavaram” and eyes sparkle. To fade when you talk about it in the present tense. Chunks of the concrete are missing. The army runs in tanks, they say. They tear up the surface. It’s overgrown, they tell me. Grass everywhere.
I turn off the road and in less than a hundred metres, the smooth scarlet ground gives way to an impossibly upward sloping, incredibly bumpy, damaged, worn concrete runway. Bose smiles at my reaction. We’re here, he tells me.
The parking lot is chock-full of exotic and normal cars alike. Ahead are the enormous stands. Beyond the forest of bamboo are the sounds of engines being revved, announcements being made over the PA and the bustle of a seriously large racing event.
Jaikumar enters the premium Rs. 50 ticket stand. Sholavaram is a great place to watch racing. The chaps at the end of the runways are rewarded with cars hitting nearly 300 kmph and motorcycles howling into the braking areas at 240 kmph. But the rest of the runway is simply too wide and too long for great visibility. Jai’s stand is best. It’s bang in the middle and offers great views of the full racetrack.
They don’t know each other, but Indu Chandhok passes within a few metres of Jai on his way up. The second storey of the stand is where race control sits. There are almost a 100 people in there. Mechanical stopwatches keep time. Ten judges handle the decision-making and monitoring. Sholavaram prides itself on running more or less on schedule, with two-minute breaks between the series of races.
Thus, the plan for Sriperumbudur was set into motion. When the racetrack started operating in 1991, Indian racing took a big step forward. It takes full credit for creating not only both the Indian F1 drivers, but also fostering every other racing hopeful we have today. But it would never have the Sholavaram’s grand spectator experience.
(This story appears in the 08 October, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)