Sahara Force India: A Force to be Reckoned With

Sahara Force India has finished the 2016 season with a bang! A career best 4 position in the constructors standing for the erstwhile minnows present a role model for the bigger teams with a budget triple of what the Silverstone based team has. Force India reached this spot beating Williams ensuring themselves a healthy boost of extra 35 million dollar worth of Prize money.

In the words of Gene Haas, owner of Haas F1 team, SFI is the role model for any team entering into the sport as the Vijay Mallya-owned team started out from the dead last position to be the best of the rest in a span of 9 years but even before that they had risen to the position of the best mid-fielder team constantly finishing in the top 6 before the V6 era propelled them ahead.

So this begs the question as to how much of Force India’s success this year is based on luck and how much of it is the genuine result of the hard work put in by a team that goes on racing and challenging the big teams on a quarter of the budget of their bigger rivals.

Beginning with the question of luck, there’s no denying that Force India is a lucky team and as Keke Rosberg puts it, you cannot go in F1 without luck on your side. Force India did benefit for a career-best 5 position in 2015 on the back of a poor marriage between McLaren and Honda which dragged this legendary alliance to the back of the grid and that meant SFI which were fighting the Woking based team the previous year for P5 inherited the position. And they were lucky again as McLaren’s progress could only bring them the middle echelon of the ever competitive midfield.

But if SFI had been lucky then they have massive challenges to face and overcome as well, something which only on the back of luck cannot be done. In F1 it’s very easy to mess up last year’s good work and fall back in the ranks ask Ferrari they’ll certainly agree. So just not to mess up is in itself a very important challenge in F1 as the ever competitive nature of the sport and especially the mid-field requires teams to innovate within the spectrum of what the rules allow to gain that ever elusive 1/10 of a second over its rivals.

Bring into the picture the skewed distribution of the prize money and then the total budget of SFI, the enormity of their achievements is finally realized. But what makes their achievement even sweeter is the fact that the team just a year back struggled with finances and as a result had to skip the major portion of pre-season testing.

With a meager budget compared to its rivals, Force India cannot update its car by introducing new parts frequently and neither can it afford the introduced updates to underperform. Because of such limitation a midfield team faces a huge dilemma of either sticking to the tried and tested method which guarantees reliability and stability or going the innovative lane which affords an opportunity to move up the ranks but it also comes with the risk of getting it all wrong and tumbling down the order.

Force India is not just any independent team but has its fair share of history going on with it. It has its roots all the way back in 1991 when it was known as Jordan, eponymous team of Ireland’s Eddie Jordan, who even then was sowing the seeds for the squad’s confused international identity.

Midland came next, and then Spyker, each for only a year in 2006 and 2007, before Indian mogul Vijay Mallya plumped for the team in 2008, entitling it with its present moniker.

With Mallya’s investment, the team has been able to rebuild using sensible business acumen and engineering nous to grow from 10th place in the standings in 2008 to P4 less than a decade later.

The first year was just like for any other newcomer, without points and at the back of the grid. Progress was painful but evident as the team immediately started performing better the next year having switched to Mercedes power from Ferrari and at the hands of Giancarlo scored a pole and a podium and upped their ranking to 9th place in the standings ahead of Toro Rosso.

As years progressed so did their achievements which reflected in their points tally and the team oscillated between 6th and 7th position for a couple of years. The V6 era came as a boon to them as the team constantly showed their might fighting with stalwarts like Ferrari and McLaren during the races and beating Williams this year.

The major reason for the upward trend is signing of Andrew Green as the Technical Director in 2011 who has remained away from the limelight and produce cars that have always been reliable and quick out of the box. And the team had been innovative as well just take a look at the B-spec VJM08 and its Nostril Style nose. With so much on the line and an intense pressure to do the job right, hats off to Andrew Green who has maintained a comparatively easy going environment within Force India unlike what’s currently prevailing at Ferrari.

The celebration with which the final classification has been received underlines just how serious an achievement this is. To beat Williams, one of the sport’s heritage teams, on the way to finishing behind only big hitters Mercedes, Red Bull Racing, and Ferrari is not to be understated.

And with next year’s regulation coming in and given SFI’s track record of producing reliable cars, the teams could at the very least emerge as the Sport’s Dark Horse.