Singled Out

The single-make Ameo Cup is one step towards progress in Indian motorsport

- Tuhin Guha

The first time I saw the Ameo Cup cars was relatively anti-climatic. It was my first weekend at a racetrack and I had built up a lot of excitement imagining these cars fly past me, making a massive racket while I watched from the startfinish straight. So when I saw the cars lined up in the pit garages with muted activity around them, I was still very excited, but I also felt a bit shortchanged.

This feeling changed quickly enough though. As the day wore on and the qualifying session came up in the late morning, the garages were buzzing with activity. The drivers were in deep discussion with the Volkswagen Motorsport India engineers, the support staff were seen constantly fiddling with the cars, and last minute preparations were in full swing.

There was an air of urgency and a bunch of determined faces all around. But there was also a sense of kinship that I could sense. Everyone seemed to be working towards the same goal. And this went all the way up to the top management. Sirish Vissa, the head of Volkswagen Motorsport was constantly in the midst of the action: Giving pep talks to the entire outfit, talking to the drivers, the engineers and even finding time to answer the many questions that we journalists had, all with an energy that seemed indefatigable. The same could also be said of the driving coaches, Rayomand Banajee and Karthik Tharani, who seemed to be these blurs of motion managing to be everywhere all at once. They were helping out the drivers, most of whom were novices and seemed quite intimidated by the scale of the event, but they also found the time to give us a quick track-driving lesson.