AHMEDABAD: After crashing out in the first lap of the Nurburgring Langstrecken-Serie 2024 due to a rib injury, dynamic racer and tech founder Akshay Gupta revealed the biggest goal of his life.
Akshay represented India as the sole driver for Mertens Motorsport in the prestigious Nurburgring Langstrecken-Serie 2024 and delivered a standout performance at the NLS3 race, overcoming formidable challenges to achieve impressive results.
The Ahmedabad-based racer asserted that now he wants to win the overall championship and not the class championship.
“One of the goals behind competing in NLS is that it will remove whatever little fear I have in terms of racing cars. If you can race here, you can be competitive and faster, and if you know the track in the world, you can scale. The goal is to win the overall championship. I don’t even want to win the class championship because in our championship there are different classes of cars. So there are close to 20 different classes of cars,” Akshay said.
“They all compete in their own individual championships, but they all drive in the same race. They all drive in the same race but they all compete for different championships. But overall, out of these 120 cars, there is one particular car that will win the overall championship. It could be from any class”, the 31-year-old said.
Races within a race! ⁰This is CUP3 action at its best during NLS3! 🤩
___#NLS #Nürburgring #Nordschleife #myraceisfairplay #dasoriginal pic.twitter.com/AIn1Eh1gu2— Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie (@vln_de) July 1, 2024
The motorsport racer said the selection for the overall championship depends on the class and not on the position where you finish the race.
“I want to win that overall championship and it doesn’t matter whether I finish the race and cross the second position, it is based on your class. If there are enough starters, they need seven or more starters to give you full points for the class. If there are enough starters, then you get full points for the class so you need to keep winning your races consistently, and I think with the pace I have it in me to do that next year”, the Mertens driver said.
Akshay also talked about the support he has received throughout his career so far. He said that his family and the university have supported him a lot. “In the initial years of my journey, I had a couple of sponsors. When I was 18, or 19, when I started racing, I won the Toyota National Championship. And that period, the responses I had were very helpful. My university, in fact, sponsored me. So that was really helpful”, he added.
In the end, the 31-year-old concluded by saying that his sister used to provide funding in the early stages of his career. “The support from the family has been great. My sister has been funding a bit of my career in the initial days. Gradually, it has just come to a point where the scale at which I compete is really large. The money involved is also high. I tend to get it out of my own savings from my own journey”, the Ahmedabad-based driver said.
Akshay began his career as a professional racer in 2010, Akshay demonstrated his prowess behind the wheel by finishing as a runner-up at the Buddh International Circuit for Toyota in the season finale of the National Championship in 2013.
His remarkable talent also earned him recognition from Nissan, which selected him after a rigorous driver selection programme out of 10,000 drivers in India to compete in their Asian GT Academy Finale held in the UK. The competition has become a major feature film released on Netflix called Gran Turismo.
Parallel to his racing endeavours, Akshay’s urge to fulfil his passion for racing led him to entrepreneurship, where he founded a connected car startup called Scouto, which has notably been acquired by online used-car retailing unicorn Spinny in December 2021.
This serves as a testament to his success both on and off the racetrack and following his triumphs in the entrepreneurial landscape, the Indian has returned to his roots in racing. (ANI)