Chandhok's F1 Debut Cost More than $600,000 Per Lap

If some of you were thinking that Vitaly Petrov paid a huge amount of money in order to make his Formula One debut with Renault F1 team – believed to be somewhere in the vicinity of EUR15 million – wait to hear how Karun Chandhok's sponsors decided to manage their money through a single race in 2010.

If we are to trust the latest reports in The Times – and the publication tends to know their stuff before writing it down and making it public – the Indian racer competed on a $5M sponsorship fee only for the Bahrain race. It seems this was the financial demands the Hispania Racing F1 Team had in order to hand the former GP2 racer the drive for the season opening round.

Simple maths would lead to the conclusion that Chandhok's adventurous debut in the Great Circus cost him more than $600,000 last weekend ($625,000 to be more precise). And that's because Chandhok failed to complete a single lap in all 3 practice runs on Friday and Saturday, while lapping the Sakhir track 7 times during qualifying.

As far as his race performance goes, the second Indian driver in the history of the sport failed to do a single lap, after hitting a bump and being projected into the tire barriers as a result. His car's front wing and left-rear wheel were damaged beyond repair it had to be stalled on the side of the circuit.

Meaning $5M divided by 8 (7 laps in qualifying and one in the race) is $625,000. Under the circumstances, we're wondering how long will HRT F1 take to develop a performing car and, more importantly, how much time Chandhok will need to get his head together and keep his car to the track, in order for his F1 commitments to actually make some sense (financially speaking).