In India if you are of European middle class wealth, then you can have a good standard of living. My father helped me start racing once I had finished my schooling, in Formula Suzuka single seaters Only 40 bhp. I wanted F1.”It was an unusual ambition for an impressionable young Indian, and he laughs at the memories. Whenever he relayed his ambition to anyone, their reaction was inevitable: “Why don’t you go and play cricket instead?” It was, after all, the national sport.His family background has helped his progress.

But he only got hooked on racing after a friend came home from a trip to Germany clutching a video tape of the 1989 Formula One season “That review changed things for me Senna versus Prost. Karthikeyan had to turn his countrymen’s perceptions around in what has been a relatively long climb. He got interested in the first place because his businessman father, G R, drove rallies in India and was national champion. In 1994 I went to see sponsors and nobody even knew what Formula One was. They knew a little bit about Senna, maybe, because he got killed But Formula One was never heard of in India back then. We never got any live television feeds from the races.”Despite Formula One’s global expansion since Senna’s death, India has been slow to awaken.

“When you are the first one to do anything it is going to be hardest. So Karthikeyan occupies a unique position as far as the Indian subcontinent is concerned.The shrug of acknowledgement he gives carries all the nonchalance of one who knows the initial struggle is over to reach the Formula One base camp. Neel Jani has tested for Sauber and Red Bull and is on the verge of Formula One, but though his father is Indian his mother is Swiss. But an Indian?The Malaysian Alex Yoong raced for Minardi in 2002.

“But his mother was English,” Karthikeyan quickly interjects. European grand prix drivers are ten a penny and have been for decades South Americans, too, since the Seventies. Out of his overalls he is an ordinary little guy who probably weighs in at 65 kilos (just over 10 stone) sopping wet. There is none of the swagger of the young race driver, and not much of the sparkle either, though his humour breaks through every so often in the form of a wide, white-toothed grin.Karthikeyan seems comfortable now but, like running in the snow, there have been plenty of times when his career has been out in the cold Only sheer persistence has got him this far. As snowflakes swirl outside the windows of Jordan’s Silverstone factory on a cold winter afternoon, he looks like any one of a hundred young dudes you could pass without a second glance on the street.