Vijay Mallya, VJ to his friends, is perfect for Formula One. A larger than life character, he is a billionaire in any currency, a man with a certain brashness about him with a big gold watch, a gold identity bracelet and matching earrings and, most important, a passion for motor racing.

One of the many new faces of the fast-expanding Indian economy whose empire stretches from airlines to alcohol and who now leads the Force India Formula One team, Mallya has been a petrolhead from his childhood days in Calcutta. It was there that he started racing at a small club set up by the expatriate British community.

The young Mallya drove souped-up Morris Oxfords, Fiats and Triumph Heralds in the 1970s when restrictive laws prevented imports of such luxuries as racing cars. He went on to drive single-seaters and old Formula One cars and won the Indian Grand Prix twice, a race open to whatever machine you could turn up in.

The sport is in his blood and now in his fifties Mallya has fulfilled a dream by buying his own team — the old Spyker backmarker, formerly Midland and before that Jordan. “I love speed,” he said, talking in the sumptuous surroundings of the Rajput suite of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, where the team launched their new car in early February.

“It’s exhilarating,” he said. “Even now, whenever I can, I will go and have a bash at a go-kart or two. It’s fun, it’s challenging. Some people love to play golf. I find it too slow and too boring. Some people like to play bridge. But racing just has that extra bit of skill and excitement, living a bit dangerously — all over, it’s a nice package.”

Mallya has come into team ownership not just as fan and an amateur racer. He has been involved through sponsorship of the old Benetton team and more recently with Toyota and so he knows the players and he knows how tough it is to get to the top. He can count Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One ringmaster, as a friend as he can Flavio Briatore, the Renault and former Benetton team principal, a man whose flamboyant style he matches.

The ambitious plan set out by Mallya is to haul his team to the top end of the grid and his goal is to achieve a podium finish by the 2010 Indian Grand Prix in Delhi (a race that is unconfirmed, pending construction of a new track). With that in mind he has doubled the budget to £60 million and hired Giancarlo Fisichella, the Italian veteran, to drive alongside Adrian Sutil, the young German.

It is a huge mountain to climb for a team at the base camp of motor sport’s Everest, but Mallya is confident that he can bring the magic touch he has applied in the business world to his Formula One project. “Jordan has always been among the top-five teams,” he said with a certain indignation. “History shows that. I’ve gone through the archives. It’s only in the last two or three years that things have gone a bit haywire so the people are the same, the factory \ is the same and now the resources are being put in. So why it shouldn’t happen isn’t, to my mind, a question mark.”

With Mallya you hear the words passion and pride a lot. Passion for motor racing and pride in taking his place on the grid at the top table of the sport. But there is equal passion about India in this super-successful individual, and the historical and social significance of what he is doing — bringing Formula One to a country for so long a byword for poverty and economic backwardness.

“At the end of the day Formula One is modern,” he said, drawing on a freshly-lit cheroot. “More than just contemporary, it is the pinnacle of cutting-edge technology and it really makes a huge statement about a country. In the past India has been portrayed as a country steeped in history with fantastic archeological monuments and elephants and camels and so on. It’s about time that people saw the face of modern of India and this is a wonderful platform to promote the face of modern India.”

Mallya recognises that cricket is akin to a religion among his 1.2 billion countrymen, a sport that appeals to people of all backgrounds. His target audience for Formula One is the emerging 400 million-strong consumer class, the new Indian middle class, some of whom command incomes on a par with Europeans.

These are people who take their holidays abroad, wear designer clothes, drink fine wines and eat in expensive restaurants. Mallya believes that this vast section of modern Indian society, which is more numerous than the population of Europe, is ripe for the glamour and excitement of Formula One.

“The glamour element is very important,” he said. “I mean who doesn’t want glamour? It’s a struggle to find anyone who doesn’t want glamour and, of course, this is at the high point of glamour. So I completely believe in Formula One.”

The Kingfisher airlines tycoon is well aware that if the team are to take off as a sporting success at home, a crucial ingredient is the presence of an Indian driver. While he may seem a touch idealistic about taking Force India to the podium in three years, he is unsentimental in his judgment of the present crop of Indian drivers, who he believes are not good enough to take one of the two seats available.

But this problem will be dealt with in typical, methodical, “can do” Mallya fashion. A national manhunt, as he puts it, will be launched to identify young Indian talent and boys will be funded through karting and junior formulas and the best of them will be assisted to go all the way to the top.

With a successful airline and the third biggest spirits business in the world to run, plus a football team, a new Indian cricket franchise, race horses, polo teams and yachts, Mallya has his hands full.

But none of this is going to stop him attending almost every race this season as he tries to put his team on the right footing to start climbing the grid.

“I may be impatient but I’m practical,” he said. “There is no point in stressing myself out and setting too high expectations.

“But if it doesn’t happen by 2010, then I will be pretty miserable and will wonder what I did wrong. I have given myself enough time and I feel pretty confident that I will achieve the objective of being on the podium in 2010.”

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