The prodigal son: Jehan Daruvala

Words by Yohann J Sethna

Who will be India’s next Formula 1 driver? It’s a question that has been asked of me for almost five years, ever since Narain Karthikeyan’s last Formula 1 race in Brazil 2012, and until now, I never really had a definitive answer. However, since Sunday the 2nd of July, there has been no doubt in my mind as to who will fill those giant racing boots and the hearts of all of us Indian racing fans. It’s Jehan Daruvala.

As winner of the Force India Formula 1 Team’s ‘One in a Billion’ mantle in 2012,  the pressure and spotlight on the then 14-year old Jehan has been great, but he seems to feed off this pressure, pushing him forward to achieve success at every stage of his career. During a six year career in karting, starting in 2009 at the age of nine, he made his mark every year, winning race after race, championship after championship, setting benchmarks for those who will follow in his footsteps in the future, culminating in a stunning third place finish in the 2014 Karting World Championship from a field of 33 drivers.

As of the time I write this, Jehan has raced in 105 single-seater Formula car races, and has finished on the podium 28 times, that’s almost 27 per cent of all the races he has entered in. He has nine pole positions, eight fastest laps and seven wins to his name too, the last of which was at the Norisring circuit in Germany in the FIA Formula 3 European Championship, and is the reason I decided to put pen to paper, figuratively speaking.

His first step into the world of single-seater car racing was in 2015, in a Formula Renault car. He raced in 30 races that year, had four podium finishes, two pole positions and a fastest lap. Ever since then, he has been on the ‘onwards and upwards’ path. He finished second in the Toyota Racing Series in New Zealand in 2016, with six podium finishes from 15 races, including three wins, three fastest laps and a pole position. He followed that up with a fourth place finish in the Formula Renault 2.0 NEC Championship held at circuits around Europe, winning one more race along the way.

He returned to the Toyota Racing Series in January 2017, this time amassing nine more podium finishes from 15 races, including two wins, four pole positions andtwo fastest laps. One of these wins, was at the New Zealand Grand Prix, adding his name to a trophy which bears the names of some of the greats in motor racing history, names like Jack Brabham, Stirling Moss, John Surtees, Bruce McLaren, Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, Keke Rosberg, all but two of whom went on to become World Champions. The most recent winner of this famous trophy who has progressed to Formula 1 is the current Williams F1 rookie star Lance Stroll, who won it in 2015.

It had been 18 years and 12 days, or 6,587 days if you want to make it sound more dramatic, since India last had one of it’s own win a Formula 3 race, the last one being Narain Karthikeyan, at the Brands Hatch Circuit in the UK, in June 1999 in the British Formula 3 Championship, at a time when British F3 was the most competitive junior single-seater racing series in the world, much the same as the European Formula 3 Championship is today.

Coincidentally both these wins have been with the UK-based Carlin Team. In fact, Narain’s first British Formula 3 race win, which was earlier that year in 1999, also at the Brands Hatch circuit, was the first ever Formula 3 win for the then fledgling Carlin Team, in it’s first full season of racing in the ultra-competitive British series. Trevor Carlin, the founder and Team Principal of the outfit said, “Narain and Jehan are from different eras. Narain was really the pathfinder for Indian motorsport abroad. He put himself on the map by winning his first F3 races with us, back in 1999. Jehan has had a much more structured path to follow. He’s been following it very well, working extremely hard; he puts a lot of effort and energy into his craft. He takes it very seriously. Right from the first test we had with Jehan, he’s always done a very good job. I have to say that I was super impressed with his level when he first joined us. This year the FIA European F3 championship is fiercely competitive. You’ve got some really big teams putting big resources in. There’s not a single weak driver on the 18-20 strong grid at each race weekend, so even to be in the top ten is a big achievement. To get regular podiums and to win from the first lap to the end is really, really difficult. The team, the driver, the engineering, really has to get everything perfect, which is good because it teaches a lot of discipline. If Jehan can keep up this level of progress, it means that he will be able to drive any racing car, anywhere in the world, whether it’s in GP2, F1, Le Mans, DTM or SuperFormula. If you win in F3, you can have a fantastic career ahead of you. So far, I’m super impressed with Jehan and I’m very proud to have yet another great Indian driver on our books. He’s got the tools and he’s using them very efficiently, so I’m very happy.”

What makes a win in Formula 3 such a great achievement? On the face of it, it’s just another junior racing championship like many others, you would think. However, although it may be similar to others, especially it’s closest rival GP3, it is very different, not just in the way the sporting and technical rulebooks are written, but even in the very philosophy of the car design and the way you have to drive it. A former F3 driver and multiple race winner Rupert Svendson-Cook put it quite succinctly, “If motorsport could be classified as an education process, then Formula 3 would be its university”.

Formula 3 has always been an ‘underpowered’ formula, with the current specification of engines producing approximately 240bhp from a 2-litre 4-cylinder engine in a car that weighs no less than 580kg with the driver. What makes this so different to other racing formulas is the level of aerodynamics of the cars, which produce a lot of downforce, making the cars very different to drive, and requiring a greater level of finesse and car control than its rival series. Learning to trust that the aerodynamic downforce of the car will allow you to carry a much higher speed through the corner than the human brain would normally expect, is a skill that only the best drivers can achieve. Jehan describes it best when he says, “in the slow-speed corners you have to get a really clean entry and not slide on the exit, but being underpowered and with the downforce we have in the high-speed you can actually attack [the corner] quite a lot. You can really be aggressive with the steering in the high-speed entry. You basically try and do all your turning on entry in high-speed, you work the car as much as you can in your first steering input so the car is settled as you go mid-corner to exit.”

The stand-out drivers learn very quickly that the way to make the car work is by wise use of the brakes at the entry to corners, and a higher mid-corner speed. Frankly, it’s a momentum game, and learning how a car behaves under weight transfer at various points of the corner, and controlling and optimising that weight transfer, are the critical elements to a good laptime. This becomes even more important during the qualifying sessions, where the tiniest of mistakes can make the difference between starting at the front or the back of the grid. In fact, in the race that Jehan won, he started second on the grid with a difference in qualifying time between himself and the pole position driver being only 83 thousandths of a second. The entire grid was separated by less than half a second.

The technical challenge for the driver in Formula 3 is also quite different to other junior categories, which are much more controlled in terms of changes allowed to settings and components used. For example, in Formula 3, brakes, springs and dampers are all open, which means different teams can use different brands and work with the manufacturers closely to fine tune the products to achieve better performance. Also the gear ratios from second to sixth are changeable. All these things make it even more important for the drivers to be more technically competent, and understand the engineering of the cars, as their feedback becomes ever more critical in the development of the car. Teamwork between the drivers is also very important, and their ability to contribute together will help push them forwards. Having strong teammates helps push all the drivers forward and Jehan has one of the strongest ones out there in Lando Norris. They are not only your teammates, but also your benchmarks and competitors so finding the right balance in the relationship is very critical. Fortunately for Jehan, his relationship with Lando is good. In his own words, “It’s a big advantage having a strong teammate, obviously he’s quite exceptional in qualifying. His record is quite good, so I always learn off him and I think I’m getting better and better. It’s just about being consistent, and not over-driving when it matters. We share a lot. We’re quite good friends. We travel together and stuff, so we know each quite well.”

Formula 3 as a category has produced more Formula 1 World Champions than any other series. Until recently, it was the British Formula 3 Championship which was the benchmark series amongst the various national Formula 3 championships that exist across the globe, but the advent, or should I say re-invention, of the FIA European Formula 3 Championship a couple of years ago, and the slow decline of the British series over the past few years has meant that the mantle of being the number one F3 series is now firmly in the hands of the FIA European Formula 3 Championship. Two of the last three champions, Esteban Ocon in 2014 and Lance Stroll in 2016 have already made their mark in F1. The 2015 champion, Felix Rosenqvist has become the hottest property in Formula E with his run of stunning results for the Mahindra Formula E Team, holding on to finish third in that championship.

Sadly, the current series, which bears the name and the mantle of the British Formula 3 Championship, is an F3 series in name only, with the cars being of a lower F4 specification. It is a shadow of it’s former glory days when it produced champions and superstars like Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart, Emerson Fittipaldi, Nelson Piquet, Ayrton Senna, Mika Hakkinen, Rubens Barrichello, Jenson Button, Takuma Sato, Daniel Ricciardo. . . the list is almost never-ending. When I spoke to Narain Karthikeyan about his days in British F3, he said, “it was definitely one of the toughest and the most challenging and competitive racing series I have ever raced in. As it’s an open formula with few restrictions, the driver could experiment on various setups. My experiences in Formula 3 taught me so much and made me realize really what it’s going to take to make it into F1.”

Another big difference between F3 and most of the other junior formulae is what I call the ‘reverse grid factor’. In the quest for more excitement, more entertainment, more overtaking, and perhaps more accidents, many of the series across the globe have resorted to having reverse grid races, where the starting order of some races is based on a reverse order of the finishing order of a previous race. This means that a championship contender with the speed and track record of a winner has to work his way up a field of potentially slower cars to win again. Although, on the face of it, this sounds like a great idea to spice up the show, it doesn’t take into account for the fact that many of todays modern generation of ultra-safety conscious circuits don’t really have as many overtaking spots as one would like, resulting in processional races, where a potentially slower driver could still win a race with great defending skills and an eighth place finish in a previous race. Formula 3 does not, and never has resorted to such artificial-result producing rules, firmly sticking to the basics of motorsport since its inception, where the drivers battle it out for pole position in a one-lap shootout  ‘all-guns-blazing’ qualifying session. Thus the value of the win is so much more than it would be otherwise. After all, a truly deserving race winner should be the fastest driver/car combination of the day, not the best defensive driver/widest car of the day.

With half of the season complete and with five race weekends comprising 15 races still to go, Jehan currently sits fifth in the championship. However, as his constantly improving form suggests, I am quite sure that he will be climbing that ladder before the season is over. A bright future ahead certainly seems to be on the cards for this Mumbai lad. Watch out for Jehan!