Thursday, 28.03.2024 | Deutsch | English
Truck racing sets out to conquer the new New World

Truck racing sets out to conquer the new New World

22. March 2014Fabien Calvet, FIA co-ordinator of the European Truck Racing Championship, has made no secret of his ambition to internationalise the series, and maybe even organise a world championship one day. As president of the Truck Race Organisation TRO, the other hat he wears, the enthusiast extraordinaire has been keen to have manufacturers from around the world involved, and to increase the number of events outside Europe. At the Truck Grand Prix in 2011 he told www.truckracing.de / www.truckrace.info that his top priority then was to establish an FIA-sanctioned race in Turkey, followed by one in India a couple of years later.
Sure enough, the first round of the ETRC was indeed held in Istanbul the next year, but the event in India remains to date a more difficult prospect — for one, because of the logistical challenge and expense of moving the entire circus so far away, and two, because of the worsening health of the truck industry with severely shrunken markets not only in Europe but also in India.
And so the January announcement by Tata Motors, India’s oldest and largest manufacturer, that it would pioneer the sport in India with its T1 Prima demonstration race, was a very pleasant surprise. The one-make, one-race “championship” was conceived primarily to raise the profile of the truck driver. In India’s caste-obsessed social construct, the profession that’s arguably of greatest importance to this growing economy languishes at the bottom of the heap.
There’s a clear element of pure self-preservation here, because the shortage of drivers in India poses an existential threat, not just to Tata but to the whole industry as well. India’s top fleetowner SVLL, also Tata’s biggest customer, estimates that about 40 percent of the fleet in the country lies idle because there just aren’t enough drivers to go around. And driving isn’t even an option for a generation that has more career alternatives than ever before in India’s history.
Tata hopes the T1 Prima race will to some extent change the image of professional driving, but even R. Ramakrishnan, vice-president (commercial) for Tata’s truck and bus business, admits it’s going to take more events, and the involvement of more manufacturers, to really turn things around.
Another equally important objective of the race is to lift spirits in an industry that is at rock bottom following more than 24 months of continuously falling sales, and Tata seems to have succeeded here already by getting its key supplier-partners, among them prominent names like Cummins, Castrol, and WABCO, involved as sponsors, not just for this inaugural event but for its future endeavours in the sport (the company refused to elaborate on its plans, if any).
The FIA-approved event this Sunday will feature 12 Tata Prima 4038.S trucks, all prepared by the OEM at its own factory in Jamshedpur with the assistance of, and in accordance with the technical regulations of, the British Truck Racing Association. The trucks are divided into six teams, one each “owned” by Cummins and Castrol, one by the Tata group’s engineering services subsidiary Tata Technology, one by “Allied Partners” Tata Steel, Rane (steering), SETCO (clutches), and RSB Group (drive axles, propeller shafts), and two jointly by a group of Tata dealers across India.
As we last reported, the trucks will be driven by drivers from the British championship, including the top six from the 2013 season and rookie of the year Simon Reid. Team Cummins appears to have had the first choice, with both 2013 British champ Mat Summerfield and Reid. Stuart Oliver, meanwhile, was snapped up by his long long-time sponsor Castrol.
Subsequent events will include Indian professional drivers, and Tata announced that it will, following this event, discuss with its fleetowner customers a concept for a racing academy to train drivers for an eventual full-blown Indian series, and for a competitive selection process.
The trucks themselves, with a nominal power level of 370 hp and a top speed of 115 km/h, come nowhere near the performance of the European race trucks — but then, Indian spectators aren’t used to seeing trucks travel at more than 40 km/h anyway, as they do on the average Indian highway. With the seasoned English pros going flat out in the 7-plus-tonne race trucks, there’s a scrappy race in store, and a spectacular introduction for the sport in this country.
The first ever truck race in India appears to have everything in it to make Fabien Calvet proud. Unfortunately the TRO chief won’t be here for the event owing to a preoccupation, which he has not allowed us to reveal yet. But this much he can be sure of: that India’s first ever truck race will lay an excellent foundation for his own vision for the sport in this part of the world.

Impressions:

Truck racing sets out to conquer the new New World
Truck racing sets out to conquer the new New World