Pix by Jagan Negi

He lives each Sunday in the fast lane of life. The speed, the sound, the wind, the crowd, and the raw aggression, all take over once Adrian Sutil steps into the cockpit of his monstrously powerful Formula One (F1) racer.

“Life as a racer is about delivering on Sundays,” pitches in the F1 speed ace and number one driver for Force India, the only team on the Grand Prix circuit with the Indian tricolor (famously owned by liquor baron Vijay Mallya in partnership with a group of Dutch entrepreneurs).

Sutil isn’t saying anything novel — for those who know about the sport — but it does reiterate his reigning passion. For him, as with most dedicated racers, life revolves around the circuit so much that he refers to the F1 team as his family. “With so much money riding on you, you end up spending all your time with the team,” he says.

Having steered his way through 2009 ensconced in a newly refurbished Force India car (it changed from a Ferrari engine to a Mercedes-Benz engine), the German racer (he’s from Gräfelfing, near Munich) earned a 9th place at the season opener in Melbourne and finished the Monza race in a career-best fourth place. The countdown for Sutil begins this year with the first session of the Bahrain Grand Prix coming up in early March.

Apart from burning rubber, Sutil is a talented piano player

“From there he travels to Australia, Malaysia, China, Spain, Monaco, Turkey, Hungary, Abu Dhabi,” says Otmar Szafnauer, CEO, Force India. And that’s only a few of the places they’ll be heading to this year.

“As a racer you have got to be in love with the idea of flying miles,” says Sutil, with a grin. Like it or not, Sutil is travelling for most of the year.

“When the season starts, I get to spend only two days at home in Switzerland. But it works perfectly for me because I do tend to get bored easily,” he adds.

The team tee that Sutil wears is emblazoned with sponsor names and tucked into casual denims, giving him an all-sporty look. But don’t miss the high-end fashion label logo —DSquared — boldly on display on the buckle of his belt. It’s not too tough to figure out the young racer loves the world of fashion.

“I am big time into adding fashion to my wardrobe. Mine is the rockstar look. And I like almost anything by DSquared,” says Sutil. On that particular evening he was scheduled to walk the ramp for fashion designer Mandira Wirk and he also confesses that he’s fascinated by traditional bandhgalas.

There’s a self-assured air about Sutil. He tackles questions with ease and is not nonplussed by anything that comes his way — the smoothness probably stemming from the regular media briefings he is used to during race weekends.

“There is a whole lot of it on the weekends during the Grand Prix. A typical day in my life would go thus: Waking up early, gymming, finishing breakfast and hitting the tracks by 9am. There is a quick succession of meetings with the physiotherapist, briefings with our engineers, driving, more briefings followed by interviews with the media and sponsor commitments, more briefings and then back to the hotel,” he notes.

So just like his fellow merchants of speed (read: Kimi Räikkönen, Lewis Hamilton, Fernando Alonso, Sebastian Vettel), Sutil re-energises at his green countryside home in Switzerland.

“With much of the time spent travelling and living in the glare of city lights, I need de-stress time in Oensingen. I like to be home alone. And when I’m home I also drive around in my white Porsche Turbo. It’s my baby,” he grins.

The 27-year-old’s tryst with the racing track goes back to the time his elder brother took him karting — Sutil was 14 then and a skilled pianist with music in his genes. His father was a violinist with the München Philharmonie and his mother a talented musician.

But all thoughts of being a musician ended after his first contact with motorsport. “Playing the piano paled in comparison,” he notes.

He first caught the attention of the motorsport world in 2002 when he won the Formula Ford Swiss championship with 12 wins in 12 races in his first season in single-seater motorsport. Within two years he had graduated to the Formula Three Euroseries, securing four podiums in his maiden season.

A significant point in his career came in 2005 when he ended his second season as runner-up to Lewis Hamilton (2008 F1 world champion) with 11 podiums in 18 races. Sutil moved to the Far East to compete in the Japanese F3 championship in 2006. It turned out to be a good year for him. He had his first international title with five wins.

The same year he joined the Midland F1 team for practice sessions and that was where his big turning point came. He was signed on a multi-year race seat contract starting 2007 when the team changed hands and became the Spykar Formula One Team. Not only did he mark an impressive performance at Monaco, but he bagged the first world championship point, both for himself and his team, in a rain-lashed Japanese Grand Prix.

In 2008, the team changed hands and was acquired by Mallya and company, when it came to be known as the Force India team. The team’s first season, in 2008, bombed as it finished without a point but then Sutil scored brownie points for it in 2009 with races like the Monza and the Melbourne ones. And with the ambition of finishing among the top five in the Formula One season this year, the team has stuck with Sutil at the helm and Italian racer Vitantonio Liuzzi as his teammate.

Now while ranking 17th on the F1 list, Sutil is known for his penchant for risks. Some refer to him as ‘an accident magnet’. Bite this: In one Formula BMW event, the organisers threatened to confiscate his licence after a spectacular mishap when he ended up flying over another car.

A high-flying adrenalin rush seems to be an addiction of sorts for him as he insists that most new tracks are ‘too safe’ for a sport that is alluring because of the risk associated with it. “Let’s hope there will be some thrill on the Indian race tracks at the 2011 Indian Grand Prix,” he smiles.

But what about his dream team, given the fact that Force India happens to be a small outfit in the big bad world of F1 racing? After a bit of thought, Sutil insists that in the world of Formula One, one can make one’s own dream team.

He says: “One has a lot of power as a driver. I want to grow together with the Force India team and log in more points. So let’s hope both of us should be in the front row soon.”