Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, also the chairman of Force India Formula One team, is racing against time to make a mark in the upcoming FIA Formula One World Championship in March 2010. He is designing next generation Formula One cars to take on competitors.
On Wednesday, he signed an exclusive three-year multi-million dollar partnership deal with Pune-based Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. Both the firms declined to reveal the deal amount.
“Force India, based in Silverstone, UK, is a 'non-resident Indian', but I want to Indianise it and win the motor race soon,” Mallya, chairman of UB Group and Kingfisher Airlines, said. He would invest in this sport and there was “no compromise”, he said. “My dream is to find an Indian Louis Hamilton,” he said. The British car racer was the youngest winner of the FIA Formula One World Championship in 2008 at 23.
Mallya said the partnership offered his team a fully automated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solution to design the team’s next generation race cars.
“Now with access to ‘eka’, India’s fastest super computer ranked fourth in the world with the capability of 133 trillion calculations per second would help improve aerodynamic efficiency of the inherited Spyker racing cars,” he said.
Mallya said the tie up with CRL would give an immediate 200 per cent increase in the CFD processing capability, which would rise to 800 per cent by the end of 2010. “We have integrated our own CFD methods, which are a critical part of Force India’s car design process, with the CRL facility to allow Force India’s CFD engineers to seamlessly interface between the UK and India effectively,” he said.
After buying the Spyker Formula One team from Spyker Cars NV in October 2007, Mallya christened it Force India after its debut in 2008. “In the second competition in 2009, we secured one pole, one podium, one fastest lap and were placed ninth in the championship,” Mallya said.
“Motor racing is my passion, it is in my blood and it meets the aspirations of the next generation of Indians,” he said, adding that he would build a big fan following for the sport through merchandising and other activities. India Force has a three-year (2009-2011) technical tie up with McLaren, UK and Mercedes, Germany for gear boxes, hydraulics and engines.
Mallya said 2010 has a line up of 19 motor races around the world till November and competitors were fighting to win the race with a lead of one hundredth of a second.
source: mydigitalfc
