There is a moment in every racing driver’s life when instinct yields to perspective.
For Karun Chandhok, that shift came with a clearer view of how radically the sport he loves has transformed.
Speaking ahead of the Red Bull Moto Jam 2026, Chandhok sounds less like a retired driver and more like a careful engineer of the sport’s future, equal parts nostalgic purist and pragmatic modernist.
These days, the former Formula One driver-turned-broadcaster watches Formula One less with a racer’s grit and more with an analyst’s long view.
The sport has grown enormously
From the outside, Formula One can appear unchanged: the same circuits, the same glamour, the same Sunday crescendo.
Karun Chandok in a candid pose during the interview Red Bull
But the “scale has changed a lot,” said Chandhok.
“The teams are much bigger,” he explained to The Telegraph Online. Strategy departments alone can now run 20 people deep. “Universities feed young engineers into race operations. Data flows constantly from radios, onboards and simulations,” he added.
Nothing illustrates the leap more than simulators.
When Chandhok worked as a test driver with Red Bull Racing in 2007, he was roped in to develop the team’s first simulator.
“I’d do three or four laps and feel sick,” he recalls with a laugh. “Mark Webber threw up in it. David Coulthard threw up in it.”
Today’s tools, he said, are “unbelievable” and so precise that teams can pre-run entire race weekends virtually.
Different cars, different minds
Chandhok’s own career — spanning Formula One, Formula E and endurance racing in the 24-hour Le Mans — gives him a comparative lens. Motorsport disciplines, he insists, are far less interchangeable than fans assume.
“We are a very unique sport,” he said. “The skill sets are quite different.”
He compares the three types of racing to the three formats of cricket and remarks that unlike cricket, you can’t just take a driver from one type of racing to another.
In Formula E, the challenge, he said, is mental. Energy management dominates everything but still coexists with tyre wear and outright pace.
Endurance racing tests something more primitive: survival.
Recalling a near four-hour night stint at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Chandhok describes a level of fatigue that borders on hallucination. “Your brain is finished,” he said. “You’re fried.”
The hybrid debate and the purist’s worry
Chandhok acknowledged that drivers today must sometimes manage energy even on their fastest runs during the qualifying lap. That, to him, dulls one of the sport’s purest thrills – maximum attack.
“That experience of taking everything out of yourself and the car to deliver that lap—they won’t have that in the same way,” he said.
He remains pragmatic. The great drivers will always rise, he said.
Advice for the next Indian hopeful
Few Indians have reached Formula One’s grid — a fact Chandhok still treats with quiet pride.
“Two out of 1.4 billion,” he said, calling it an exclusive club whose membership he shares with Narain Karthikeyan.
When asked what advice he would give to a young aspiring Indian racer, he answered:
“Keep your feet on the ground,” he says. “Take it one step at a time.”
The sport, he warned, can discard talent quickly. Ambition must be matched with realism.
Looking back now, Chandhok admitted he sometimes wished he had paused more to absorb the scale of moments as they happened.
“At the time, though, there was always another setup to think about, another lap to prepare for,” he said.
In racing, even reflection arrives at speed.