Interview with A. Sandeep Kumar, Professional racing car driver

Q1. Can you sum up your experience of winning the 2012 Volkswagen R Cup season in the Pro Category? 

The level of competition last year was really good. Ameya Walavalkar for example is a multiple national level champion. Avdumber Hede and Mihir Dharkar also came into the championship with  plenty of experience under their belt. So basically you needed to have good pace to drive alongside any of these guys, and I enjoyed the challenge.

2012 was my debut year in Touring cars and so we had to go through a lot of preparation before the start of the season. The first stage yielded good results as I managed a podium and collected some crucial points. The latter part of the season was bad as there were many crashes and race incidents, but I still managed to consistently finish at the top and earn points in the battle for the championship title.

Q2. How was it competing at the Buddh International Circuit?

BIC is undoubtedly an amazing circuit to race on. The changing elevation, fast corners and wide run off areas are characteristics of the Buddh circuit and racing there was a major learning curve. We were able to push the cars to their absolute limit here, so this helped us not only improve as drivers, but also better understand the technicalities of the race car.

Q3. Tell us a little about the Polo R Cup race car last season? Has the introduction of the TSI model with a DSG auto box and paddle shifters helped improve performance?

I had the opportunity to drive previous 1.6 litre TDI manual version of the Polo at the Colombo Street circuit last year. It was a lot of fun to drive particularly because you had to keep fiddling with gears all through. DSG on the other hand is also a very rewarding transmission setup, but you need to spend some time with the DSG setup to get used to the gear ratios, especially where the downshifts are concerned.

Newer technologies like paddle shifters are also a welcome addition to motorsports here in India. You could say we are quite fortunate to have driven such cars here in India, rather than overseas where it would have cost us much more for a similar sort of exposure. 

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Q4. What are your expectations going into the Scirocco R Cup this year? 

The first year in any new motorsports series is a definite learning curve. I don’t really expect a place on the podium in my very first year at the Scirocco R Cup as my exposure to the international circuits where I will be competing have been negligible, barring Oschersleben, where I tested a few weeks back. For starters I would like to spend time learning the basic fundamentals of racing on newer circuits.

Once we are better versed with the newer circuits and the performance and handling of the race car we will stand a better chance of finishing in the top 10. In the tests we did in fact manage to finish in 8th position so that’s where we will look to move up from. Rather than having far-fetched goals and expecting too much right at the start of the season we will take things as they come and try and produce the best possible result.