Last month, TVS Racing signed on Shreya Sundar Iyer, its first woman rider for the Indian National Rally Championship. We wrote some of these super-fast women here, these are photographs of the speed demons, and of them winning races on some of the most challenging terrains in India.
16-year-old Mira Erda is one of the youngest professional racers in India, and she’s barely out of school yet. Erda says that her fascination with racing began while go-karting at a track in Vadodara, her hometown.
She adds, “I used to do really well, so my dad asked me if I wanted to go a step further into professional racing. I just thought, let’s try it out and see what happens.” She completed a training programme and started racing professionally in 2010, at the age of – you won’t believe it – nine.
“When you race you’re completely awake, every single second that you’re on the race track. Every single sense in you is awake. I love the feeling of adrenaline at that time; I love that element of pushing yourself, and knowing whether you can make this corner or not. It’s thrilling,” says Chithra Priya, who’s the only Indian female biker to complete the Saddle Sore endurance ride.
Priya is full of stories from her racing. She’s encountered tree-uprooting elephants in a village, and has run out of fuel and “driven on fumes” on a pitch-black route.
“Recognition is really hard,” Priya says, “our country doesn’t respect motorsports. Millions of people, talented people, they have no solution. There’s so many hierarchies that you have to break. But it is what it is. I’m a very positive person. You come to a point where you either give up, or you just keep going. I could never give up; I’ve tried! I’m sure it’ll be worth it in the end. At the end of it, if there weren’t so many risks, it wouldn’t be as fun!”
For Bombay-based racer Sneha Sharma, it’s the precision required to be a racer that brings her back to it time and again.
The 25-year old says, “It’s my love for speed and precision. In any other sport you’re pushing your body to the limit, which is difficult. But pushing a machine to its limit and becoming one with it is something completely different and on another level. I think complexity is what drives me to it.”
Racing is an expensive sport, and Sharma says, “My family found it very difficult to fund my racing. They had to take out loans to educate me. I started working with my team part time, I used to take up managerial jobs for cleaning of cars, training the drivers, cleaning up the go-karts.