Peter Windsor, a former General Manager at Ferrari and Team Manager at Williams, believes that the combination of Adrian Sutil and Karun Chandhok would be Force India’s ideal line-up for the upcoming season, with the Vijay Mallya-run team yet to confirm either of its drivers after running Sutil alongside Vitantonio Liuzzi in 2010.
“It’s a difficult question to answer straight off,” the journalist and broadcaster explained in a comprehensive pre-season interview with GPUpdate.net.
“You have to look at the history of the team and what they’re doing and where they’re going. I love the way Vijay Mallya has evolved in the IPL (Indian Premier League for cricket) and has his own team there and is larger than life, all those things are wonderful, but what I don’t understand and find astonishing is that he’s still so enthusiastic about Formula 1 but is still spending millions and millions and millions of euros on his Formula 1 team which at the moment is not really even stagnating, it’s going backwards.
“So I feel sorry for him there and I think he should by now be generating proper commercial sponsorship and should be able to choose his drivers as he wants them on merit; that doesn’t seem to be happening for whatever reason and I don’t know why – you would think the Indian F1 team with an Indian Grand Prix coming up would have Indian sponsors all over it, but most of the companies on the car appear to be companies that he owns personally, in other words his own money, or companies brought to him by Adrian Sutil.
“So I find all that very strange, but I would definitely run an Indian driver in one car and try to get into corporate India and get a lot of support from corporate India around the Grand Prix. Obviously Karun Chandhok’s done a good job so far to get to where he is; he’s intelligent, he’s fit, he’s young, he’s good-looking, he’s a good guy, so I’d probably run him although I do still think Narain Karthikeyan is very fast and underrated – he’s still a bit rough around the edges but he’s still got a lot of pace beneath him.
“For the other car I would take the best guy that I could get and it could well be Adrian Sutil. As I’ve said a couple of times on Twitter, I think Adrian still needs to be disciplined a bit in a number of ways - I think he makes too many mistakes on the race track but he’s very fast and he’s a great guy as well. It would be a very nice team, two nice personalities.
“Obviously Nico Hülkenberg’s around as well, he’s another guy, but he’d probably want more money than I would be prepared to pay him if I was in Vijay’s position, so if it was between Sutil who was bringing a bit of sponsorship with him and Hülkenberg, I would probably go for Sutil, but if Hülkenberg wanted to drive for nothing - but I was able to pay him a few bonuses for podium finishes and the odd pole - I would consider him very strongly as well.”
See also:
- Peter Windsor’s Pre-season Feelings – Part 1
- Part 2 to follow on Monday
Series
Formula 1
Personalities
Peter Windsor
Karun Chandhok
Adrian Sutil
Teams
Force India F1
Other
DTM Tickets (best price guarantee!) at Sportstadium.com
| Adrian Sutil | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |
| More Adrian Sutil photos | |||
| Karun Chandhok | |||
 |  |  |  |
| More Karun Chandhok photos | |||
| Peter Windsor | |||
 |  |  |  |
| More Peter Windsor photos | |||
English
Nederlands
Español
Italiano
