Rally Raid
We explore how one of India’s best solo rally racers managed double victories at one of Rajasthan’s premier rally racing championships while revisiting some of the dunes he excels at.
To begin with, let me admit that none of these photos were clicked during Desert Storm 2019. All of them were clicked a day after the rally had ended and Aabhishek Mishra had secured the Desert Storm Xtreme cars title for a consecutive year, and a fourth in total.
His victories in 2010, 2015, 2018 and 2019 have been astonishing considering he managed the feats as a privateer, handling all of the logistics of his race by himself.
The tyres, mechanics, tuning, spare part inventory, crew size, and ultimately the budget of competing in a rally are all managed by Aabhishek himself. Most of India’s top rally racers have a team of experts plotting out the competition on their behalf; all they have to do is steer. But that isn’t the case with Aabhishek as he micromanages everything.
Aabhishek’s tryst with Desert Storm is particularly interesting after his 2018 win because he was a privateer driving a Maruti Suzuki Grand Vitara and his closest competitor was Suresh Rana from the Maruti Suzuki Motorsport Racing Team, driving the same car. The difference was that Rana had a team of Maruti Suzuki experts – explicitly trained to extract the best out of the car – while Aabhishek was relying on his trusted team of three.
Aabhishek has had a skeleton team for years. It’s just his friend Indrojit Sircar (aka Sparky, who runs Sparky’s Garage in Noida), who tunes Aabhishek’s car for races, and two mechanics that work on the car. But with this team, he was able to beat Suresh Rana – and all the other racers at Desert Storm 2018.
Born and raised in Jaipur, Aabhishek is all too familiar with Rajasthan’s weather conditions. He knows that an air temperature of 45 degrees in the desert can cause the car to break down if the driver demands too much from it. He believes that in the dunes a driver should not be loading the car with power – he says that the skill of the driver in handling the car efficiently can get more speed out of the car than punching the gas.
Eventually, the way he tuned his car in Desert Storm 2018 was perfect because his was one of only two cars to not break down during the rally – Suresh Rana’s car had engine failure from overheating and none of the top cars of the Maruti Suzuki Motorsport Racing Team managed to complete the rally. Aabhishek had managed to outdo a factory team with their own car – a turning point in Indian motorsport.
For a bigger challenge in 2019, Aabhishek entered the Indian National Autocross Championship. He usually prefers to stick to rallies in north India because of the expenses of motor racing (he receives no external financial backing as a privateer). But he managed to win the open two-wheel drive sub-1400cc category of the autocross championship this year.
It was the perfect warm-up for Desert Storm 2019, where he would be facing one of his biggest challenges ever with multiple Indian National Rally Championship and Asia-Pacific Rally Championship winner Gaurav Gill having returned to compete after a few years.
Gill was racing in a Mahindra XUV 500 while Aabhishek was in his Grand Vitara. Once again, he had the car tuned for the exact conditions of the rally rather than just being able to speed through. This showed as he was able to comfortably take his car to the finish line after Gill’s car lost power from being stuck in the soft sand terrain on Day 4 of the rally.
When I asked Aabhishek how he had managed to win Desert Storm multiple times when some of the best – including “Gaurav bhaiya” – somehow got caught in the mix, the soft-spoken Rajasthani driver said he tuned his car for reliability over power. He credited a very good suspension set-up and knowing how to handle his Vitara as the secrets to his success.
While the rally was on, Aabhishek was completely in the zone. I’d only see him briefly speak with Sparky about how the car needed to be tuned overnight for the next stage. His conversations with officials and other drivers would be brief before he would retire for the night. It wasn’t that he was rude; he had just calculated that he needed a good amount of rest to be able to perform well the next day.
I had spoken with him in the weeks leading up to the rally to let him know I wanted to click some photos with him and discuss his story. But I only introduced myself the night before the last stage of the rally because he had managed a sizable lead by then and just had to coast to victory.
He was extremely courteous – which I’ve always noticed about him – and gave me a firm handshake. The next day he celebrated winning Desert Storm 2019, and we quickly made plans to visit the Sam Sand Dunes on the outskirts of Jaisalmer.
A few days later, we caught up in a hotel in Jaipur to glance through the photos we had made in the backdrop of the Jaisalmer Fort, some Rajsthani villages and among the dunes where his rally-weathered car lost most of its power and got stuck in the sand.
Our conversation was heavily influenced by our mutual love for motorsports with Aabhishek sharing his thoughts about how he isn’t just a rally driver trying to win but part of an ecosystem that has to make racing flourish in the country. He speaks highly of most people in Indian motorsport, and that’s when I realised what drives this race car driver isn’t unending passion like most other racers, it is a sense of admiration for his competitors and the discipline that he is part of.