Generation Speed is billed as the first motoring festival in India. The first edition is being organised over the February 22-23 weekend at Aamby Valley in Maharashtra by the same organisation that holds the annual India Bike Week (IBW) in Goa. The idea is to drive, race, drift all kinds of cars and some two-wheelers ranging from vintage ones to the latest supercars and modded and boosted beasts, both on the road and off it. That basically means that it covers a huge range of car events. In the run up to smoking some rubber, t2 spoke with Martin da Costa, festival director, Generation Speed, and CEO, 70 EMG. Excerpts.

It has been about 10 years of IBW and you hadn’t thought of doing a car event. Now you have. What was the trigger?

About three or four years ago, we saw the the way IBW was growing. And we just thought, you know, we did IBW because we’re bikers and we wanted to do an event that we wanted to go to. But we also love cars. And we just saw the way the way the bike community came together and made IBW their own. I mean it’s almost as if we don’t own IBW. It’s owned by the bikers.

And we’ve got a lot of the guys and the girls in the office who are really into cars as well. We’ve got guys who modded their cars and and, you know, dream about cars and we just know that there’s this enormous community of car lovers in India. And it’s not just people who follow motorsport, although there’s a lot of them, or supercars and hypercars, but there’s also the modded cars and the people who tune. Because of the people that race their cars, the guys that go to the drag strips, the 4x4 guys, the overlanders... I mean, it’s an enormous, enormous community. But there’s nowhere for them to meet, right?

I mean at IBW we get 25,000-30,000 bikers every year. And they’re there to meet each other as much as anything else, as much as to see the new bikes and the new launches and all that sort of stuff. And so we thought, okay, well, let’s create a festival which is a genuine Indian motoring festival which which brings all these communities together.

So what would you do at the festival?

We thought, well, the core of it, the centre of it will be every year we’ll go out and we’ll select really carefully 200 of the the greatest cars, mainly cars and some bikes, that exist in India and they could be the latest motorsport cars that are winning races, or the the latest hypercars and supercars... the best of them, the best modded cars, the best tuned cars. It could be the best vintage and classics that you could have — a 1924 Mercedes — and let’s race them against the clock at the absolute peak of what they could do. Let’s put them into classes and then let’s surround that with every other aspect of culture in India. And that’s kind of what we’ve done.

Is participation in the event by invitation? Or can somebody pay a fee and join?

Both. So we’ve gone out and selected and invited the owners, the collectors of the 200 best cars in various classes, to race and, then, on top of that there’s another 300-400 cars on display in all sorts of different classes. So there’s some of the most beautiful vintage and classic cars on display. There’s some of the most amazing supercars, sportscars, and there’s a really cool section which is Indian cars of yesteryear. So, like a lot of the kids today have never seen a (Hindustan) Contessa. I mean, I used to own a Contessa back in the ’90s. We’ve got a huge selection of tuned cars. India has a lot of garages that tune cars especially and also a lot of garages that modify cars. So, we got a big section of those. Some of the best modifying garages and engineers and experts in the country are coming with their collections. So, in total, there are about 500-plus cars on show. The other thing we’re going to do as well is... So there are a lot of guys and girls driving up with the latest, say, Aston Martin Vanquish. So, we’ll grab that car and we’ll put it in the festival for people to see.

Talking about activity, it seems to be key in this whole Generation Speed event. So you’re not like inviting cars just to be on display. You want them to do something, you want them to drive. This is not for the trailer queens...

Generation Speed will be India's first motoring festival and include a wide range of events of events, most of which will involve driving the cars at the show rather than just displays

Yeah. So there’s a lot of racing... there’s also (auto)cross. We’ve been going to Auto Expo for 30 years. Every year we build stalls for MG and for Hyundai and for Kia and these guys and nothing happens at Auto Expo. There are cars stuck right on a stage or on a plinth... on a platform. And it’s kind of boring. What we think is we want to see those cars move. We want to see them race. We want to hear them. We want to touch them, feel them. So all of that, yeah. There is autocross, there’s a 4x4 trail, there’s overlanding, these cars have been modified to go from here to Iran or wherever. So there’s a display of that as well and also people can sit in a rally car, for example, or in a sports car and be driven on the track. They have to pay, but it can happen. There are quite a few different competitions in different classes for the general public to enter.

This is mostly happening around the (Aamby Valley) airstrip?

It’s mostly at the airstrip. But then there is there is an area just off the airstrip where we’ve created a 4x4 track. Land Rover is bringing their Defenders, so people can actually go in a Defender on the trail. There’s another 4x4 trail as well. The auto cross will happen on the other side of the landing strip. And we made chicanes and so on. It’s just not a drag. It’s a timed run through chicanes.

How can people be more participative?

There are there are quite a few areas where you can participate. So we’re doing a drift competition. It’s two or three different competitions actually.

What kind of turnout are you expecting?

I don’t know. You see, it’s difficult (to say). I mean, just the collectors and the community of everyone who is involved is about 1,500 to 2,000 people. And then we’re expecting to sell about 5,000-6,000 tickets this year... in the first year.

You see it at Auto Expo and you see it at Gautam Singhania’s classic car event that just happened in Mumbai. It’s that the queues were kilometers long. So we’re not doing this in a vacuum. It hasn’t happened in India, but there’s a festival in the UK called the Goodwood Festival of Speed. That’s a quarter of a million people. That’s ₹10,000-₹15,000 each to be there over three or four days. We’re modelling the sort of growth of Generation Speed on what Goodwood was able to do. And we’re patient. It took us 10 years to build IBW. I think it’ll take us five to six years to build Generation Speed.