If Dev Anand had been listening to my chit chat with Karun Chandhok, the racing green legend of Bollywood would have tapped his head and sighed dreamily: “Yes, yes, yes, an idea is forming in my mind for the biggest blockbuster of all time…”

Within three days, the first draft of the script would be ready. It would be about a 23-year-old Bombay ka Boy who defies his father who wants his son to follow him into his bent business, becomes a racing driver, overcomes all the odds and the baddies and eventually wins the world championship — and the prettiest girl in the pit stop. With his boundless enthusiasm, Devsaab would call the movie Duniya Ka Fastest Desi, and it is a racing certainty he would cast himself as the romantic lead, with a fresh 16-year-old girl discovered on his travels as the love interest.

Well, Karun is 23 and after winning a major race on the famous Spa-Francorchamps track in Belgium in September, he can claim to be the fastest Indian in the world. He is sponsored by Red Bull, the company that makes the energy drink and for which he has just tested Formula 1 cars in Barcelona.

“But I am not a rebel at all,” laughs Karun, who happens to be in England at the moment.

It is certainly a problem being a rebel when his supportive father, Vicky Chandhok, now 50, was a racing driver in the 1970s, as was his grandfather, Indu, 20 years earlier. The latter even founded the Federation of Motorsports in India.

“I always knew I would do something in motor sports — that’s all I have ever wanted to do, really,” Karun confides with passion.

Personally, I have done nothing more than 85 mph (136kmph) on the motorway in Britain (which is 15 mph more, I am sorry to say, than the speed limit), so I wonder what has been the top speed Karun has hit.

Depending on the circumstances, it’s between 360 kmph (225 mph) and 330 kmph (206 mph), he estimates.

“So there is no room for error?”

“Very little.”

I have to ask him: “Doesn’t your mum worry about you?”

“I don’t think she does any more,” he says. “I think she did in the early days.”

For someone this young, Karun comes across as remarkably focused and mature. He knocks the notion that the pit is peopled entirely by beautiful girls with long blonde hair blowing carelessly in the wind.

“I have zero social life,” he insists, shattering the Hollywood illusion. “It revolves around the sport because it is all about networking and preparing and training and working to get yourself up to Formula 1.”

I confess that what I know about motor sports would not fill the back of the proverbial postage stamp. But there is this intriguing question why out of 1.3 billion people, the only two Indians who have made Formula 1 — he and Narain Karthikeyan, seven years his senior — both happen to be from Tamil Nadu.

“It’s just that we have access to facilities that people in other parts of the country don’t,” explains Karun. “The only two race tracks that we have in the country are in Chennai and Coimbatore (Karthikeyan’s birthplace).”

But it’s back to basics and it is worth understanding why Karun is likely to become a role model for Indian youth, if he isn’t one already. He was born in Madras on January 19, 1984, attended a local school called Sishya, and 10 days after he completed his 12th year examination left for the Philippines for his first international race. He was 16 at the time.

“I have never had the time or the opportunity to go to university because I have been racing ever since,” he recalls.

Since the legal age for driving on Indian roads is 18, he had to be given a special licence by the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile (FIA) to allow him to compete in races alongside grown ups.

His CV tells the tale of a boy with fiercely precocious talent. In 2000, he was the Indian national racing champion with a record breaking seven race victories. The following year, after eight race wins, he was named the “most promising Asian driver of the year”. In 2003, he came third in the British Formula 3 National class and became India’s first and only certified instructor at the Silverstone race school at the Formula 1 venue in England.

In 2004, he partnered Karthikeyan in a World Series race and was named Overdrive magazine’s “Motorsport man of the year” for the second time.

I fast forward Karun to contemporary events and his GP2 victory in Belgium. He has now outpaced Karthikeyan as the fastest Indian by winning a race that no Indian has won before. But just what is GP2?

“Basically, in motor sports there are different categories of racing,” says Karun. “Formula 1 is obviously the top of our sports. It is the pinnacle of the sport and where every driver wants to be. On the way to Formula 1 you have various levels. You start off with go carts. Then there are various options depending on where you are in the world. In India we start with Formula Maruti. From there you move on to Formula Asia, then Formula 3 and then you move to either the World Series by Renault or GP2 — and GP2 is the official support championship for Formula 1. It is basically Formula 2 for want of a better word.”

When he won the GP2 race in Belgium, driving for a team called Durango and personally sponsored by Red Bull, it was a historic first for an Indian. He is modest and matter of fact about his success: “I was the first Indian to win a GP2 race. It’s the highest level of success for our country.”

Red Bull was so thrilled that it decided to promote Karun to testing its Formula 1 cars over two days in Barcelona.

“If you look at the three years of GP2, there have been 14 or 15 drivers, including myself, who have gone from GP2 and onwards to test in Formula 1 or race in Formula 1 — including people like Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. It is definitely the place to be if you want a career in Formula 1.”

Karun remembers the defining moment: “The first time any trainee driver drives a Formula 1 car is the biggest step in their career.” The only other Indian to have done it, incidentally, is Karthikeyan, who made his debut with the racing team, Jordan, in 2005, before becoming a Formula 1 test driver for another team, Williams.

“To be only the second person out of a billion people from my country to do it is a pretty good feeling,” acknowledges Karun.

He gives a thoughtful answer when I ask what distinguishes a very good driver from a Formula 1 champion — which he would like to be. “There is a degree of talent and ability required which you have to be born with,” he points out. “But what is different in motor sports is that you have to have extra capacity in your brain to go with a lot of technical issues. You have to remember that ours is the only sport in the world which is technologically driven. There is a lot of activity that goes on behind the wheel, a lot of things where you have to interact with the engineers.”

His ambition is to become established in Formula 1 by 2009 and drive himself to bigger challenges: “For me there has always been more pressure from within. You should not need other people to push you.”

At Barcelona, it was a dream come true to have dinner with David Coulthard, the Scottish driver who was a hero when he was a boy. “It was surreal sitting there sharing a table with him — both our cars were parked right next to each other,” he says, sounding not unlike a schoolboy who has got to open for India with Sachin Tendulkar.

May be if Dev Anand ends his blockbuster with a shot of Dev Anand on the podium shaking a Salmanazar of champagne, he might well be anticipating the future.