Narain Karthikeyan has decided to bring down the curtains on his fledgling romance with the Williams team in Formula One.
MUMBAI: Narain Karthikeyan has decided to bring down the curtains on his fledgling romance with the Williams team in Formula One. Having gone out of contention from the Force India team, owned by Indian tycoon Vijay Mallya, Karthikeyan’s exposure to anything worth its wheels on the tarmac this season is now just limited to A1GP.
His agent Mark Perkins confirmed the news but maintained: “There is the A1 GP, the Speedcar series and we are also still in talks with a few F1 teams.”
Karthikeyan’s contract for testing with Williams officially ends on December 31 and the Williams team have so far been happy with him as a test driver. However, recent F1 changes for testing have cut short whatever scope Karthikeyan had and it did not make any sense for him to stay put.
Claire Williams, the spokesperson for the F1 team, said “the team would like to refrain from any comment at this juncture.”
“The new rules meant it more essential for the drivers to do the testing at the end of the season and it left little scope for Narain (Karthikeyan),” Perkins explained.
As per the rules in F1, the use of traction control (see box) and other sensitive electronic devices has been banned. Hence to get better first hand information of the car, it has become imperative for drivers to test the cars themselves.
Interestingly, the Williams appointed 22-year-old Kazuki Nakajima as its official driver for the 2008 season last week along with Nico Rosberg. And according to the new rules, both the drivers were at hand at the testing sessions at Barcelona.
Karthikeyan and Karun Chandhok have already been ignored by Force India despite making the right noises when they took over the Spyker team.
Choices narrowing down for Force India
Adrian Sutil, who has a contract until the end of the next season with Force India, has confirmed that he is staying on despite rumours of him being linked with Williams, McLaren and Toyota. The rumours were further fanned by reports saying that Lewis Hamilton preferred Sutil as his team mate at McLaren. Both are good friends off the track as well.
Sutil, on the other hand, said he expected either Christian Klien or Vitantonio Liuzzi to join him when Mallya is expected to announce the driver line-up. Other big names such as Giancarlo Fisichella and Ralf Schumacher are also in the fray.
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