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Pit Stop

In just a few days time we will finally get to find out who the new Formula One world champion is. It's been a long and sometimes tortuous route, but nonetheless exhilarating for that.

The nature of Formula One will mean that whatever happens in Sao Paulo, the focus will soon turn to Melbourne next year and the start of a new season. In all honesty, the horse-trading over drivers and the development on new cars started way back in the height of summer. I don't intend to get into the full ins and outs of crystal ball gazing, but let me tell you one thing I know for sure - the Indians are coming.

Be assured this invasion is coming on several fronts. First of all, there is the Indian F1 team - Spyker. The team who have worn the orange of Holland now have a slightly more exotic feel. Spyker have just been sold to Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya, the man who owns the Kingfisher brand among others. Mallya seems an astute businessman and a massively keen motor racing fan and he'll need to be both to bring stability and eventually success to a team who are now on their fourth owner in three years. The most important thing is that he has money behind him and from initial comments is happy to spend it to get the team heading towards the podium.

Then there is the Indian Grand Prix. Mallya is well connected. Not only is he now the owner of an F1 team, he's also soon to be the head of the newly merged Indian Motorsport Federation. Added to that he's a member of the Indian parliament, so the delicate and often fractious politics of Indian motorsport looks now to be working together. After years of on-off speculation, it looks likely that an Indian Grand Prix is imminent. An agreement has been signed with the Indian Olympic Association to stage a race in New Dehli from 2009. It is still dependent on conditions being met, but there finally seems a will for India to get its act together.

All this action brings the real possibility of an Indian driver in the paddock. With Spyker in Indian hands, it's more than likely the team will have at least one driver from the sub-continent. Of course we have already seen Narain Karthikeyan drive for a season at Jordan, the team who eventually became Spyker. To be brutally honest he wasn't much good at the time, making too many basic errors. But he's spent two seasons test-driving at Williams so it may be that he's matured into a driver who can cope at the top level.

If not there is another option, possibly for the 2009 season. Karun Chandok has just finished his first season in GP2, and made big strides in the second half of the season. So much so that he took his first race win with an audacious overtaking manoeuvre that will have made people sit up and notice. It won't have hurt that GP2 takes place as the support race to Formula One, with the F1 paddock always keeping an interest in what is happening. It also won't have hurt that his father, Vicky, is a former president of India's national motorsport federation, and is well connected within F1.

There is one last thing to consider - the Indian fans. I know from my time presenting Formula One on TV across the region that there are some passionate F1 fans on the sub-continent. We all know how fanatically Indians follow cricket. If similar enthusiasm could be harnessed for F1, the sport would get a real boost. Already there are tens of millions of Indian fans following it on television. Should the country get it's own GP that figure could become hundreds of millions. The genie would well and truly be out of the bottle.

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