Life in the fast lane: Akshay Gupta’s journey from entrepreneur to racing contender

From experiencing his first taste of speed at the tender age of four to becoming a serious contender for the Nürburgring title, Akshay Gupta’s journey embodies resilience and passion in equal measure. Born with clubfoot, Gupta has overcome significant physical and emotional hurdles, shaping his fierce determination both on and off the racing circuit.

Fresh off the back of successfully building and selling his connected car startup, Gupta swiftly returned to racing, a testament to his belief that “racing is a life sentence”. Now aiming to inspire fellow Indian racers and foster diversity in motorsport, Gupta opens up about his relentless pursuit of victory, handling setbacks like a recent high-speed crash, and his ambitious plans to revolutionise employment conditions for millions in India. Read his exclusive conversation with Business Today.

PD: You began racing very early in life. How did that early spark survive the financial and physical hurdles that followed? 

Akshay Gupta: I began racing professionally at around 14 but had my first experience with speed and go-karts at the age of 4. I feel it is a lot of passion and some madness that it survived. I keep saying this that if I put my mind to something, it is difficult to stop me from achieving it. I have always been this stubborn about things I am deeply passionate about.

PD: How has living with clubfoot shaped your mindset on and off the circuit?

Akshay Gupta: I think it has shaped me in a good way and a bad way, both. You see, it taught me how to go through pain and suffering. I think it is important to learn that if you wish to be a high-performing individual in life, business or sports. Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, was asked, How does one become a successful entrepreneur, his answer was that “Resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for, 'I hope suffering happens to you.’ Greatness comes from character & character is formed out of people who have suffered. I wish for ample doses of pain and suffering for you”. In that way, I was born right. 

But chronic pain also shapes your brain in a very different way. Especially when you experience it as an infant, when the neuroplasticity is much higher. I have lived with it for 32 years, and it has a range of different outcomes, one of which is that your brain just makes you very numb to everything. That’s the bad part. 

PD: How did founding a connected car startup influence your understanding of motorsport technology?


Akshay Gupta: Not a lot in terms of technology but a lot in terms of operations & management. Because what we did with Connected Car was real-time data acquisition, data processing and interpretation for a consumer-facing interface. Whereas, the data acquisition for race cars is at a much higher frequency with higher accuracy, but those are not the systems we play around with; those are standard equipment. What we play around with is a lot of vehicle dynamics or basically physics. 
Having said that, I view the operations of a team and its management with a very different eye now. I say that motorsport is the business world on steroids. Everything that you will experience over 4-5 years in business will happen over the course of a few races in front of you. So, the solutions are much more apparent and easy to implement since you have some framework of what sort of problem requires what solutions. That’s the biggest change post building a start-up, I can see operational & management problems & their solutions more clearly.

PD: You returned to racing soon after selling your startup. Was that comeback planned or pure instinct?

Akshay Gupta: Ever since I started my company, I have had a very clear vision. GET BACK BEHIND THE STEERING WHEEL. All these years, building my company, I had this poster on my wall of my dream race car’s cockpit view with a quote underneath that read, “Racing is a life sentence”. I don’t know how many nights I must have dreamt of racing again, hands and legs moving in my sleep as though I were driving. So, 6 days after the money hit my bank for selling my company, I was back in a racecar. 


PD: In just two years, you’ve gone from comeback to champion contender in the Nürburgring series. What’s driven that acceleration?

Akshay Gupta: A lot of hard work on and off the track. 

On the track, it is so important to work with the right people. Let it be the co-drivers or the team. I found the right team after experimenting with a few teams and speaking to a lot of them and I was lucky to find the right co-drivers. Daniel is 2-time champion in class and Alex & I shared the car last year and have great brotherhood between us. It is difficult to align 3 fast drivers together in a fast car that has a shot at the championship. So, finding that right mix was important and my experience in business helped me get there faster. 

As for off the track, for the last two years, I have had 300+ physiotherapy sessions and been working nonstop on my physical fitness and rebuilding that killer instinct that is required in motorsport. The seven years off the track made me lose it somewhere. Took me a lot of inner restructuring to bring it back. 

I think with all this inner work, physical work and the right team, right co-drivers, I am confident we will win the championship this year. 



PD: What does winning at the Nürburgring mean to you personally, and for aspiring Indian racers?

Akshay Gupta: Nurburgring is THE place to test man and machine. Every single performance car manufacturer in the world tests their vehicles on the track as a testament to their capabilities. I feel there is no better test for a racecar driver than the Nurburgring racetrack in today’s day and age. So, of course, winning there, in a highly competitive field, against some of the best drivers, is very fulfilling. It makes me believe in my abilities more. I am the only Indian gunning for the NLS title and I have been getting calls from a lot of Indian racers wanting to know how they can also compete at the ring. I think, watching me, a lot of them got the conviction that it is possible for Indians to go and win in European championships. 
 
PD: You’ve now raced in the Dubai 24-Hour. What did it feel like representing India on such a demanding global stage?


Akshay Gupta: Proud. There are a handful of Indians competing in international motorsport and to be one of them and to be fast amongst global competition always makes me proud. I am very patriotic, I want to build businesses to better our nation and represent the country in International motorsport and win. 

PD: Do you see your journey opening doors for more diverse athletes in motorsport?

Akshay Gupta: Totally. My current drive in Nurburgring is 50% sponsored by the team and the Dubai 24 hours was almost 65% team sponsored. There are countless such opportunities in GT cars & endurance racing for fast drivers across the globe. This is also a much more affordable form of motorsport with a different ladder altogether. An F1 ladder is clear (Karting>F4>F3>F2), and it costs around $10-million over 10 years. Whereas, the permutations for GT racing are countless and can cost less than $1 million over 6-7 years if done right. I want to charter a path & a ladder with my journey in GT cars and let that be an example for more Indian racers to follow. 

PD: After the crash earlier this season, what’s been the hardest part of getting back into the driver’s seat, physically or mentally? How are you preparing for the next race?

Akshay Gupta: Well, the crash was one part of it. I also lost my brakes at 240 kph going down Foxhole during qualifying. Then the wheel nut breaking during the race does not inspire much confidence in the car. Frankly, I have not thought a lot about it, but it does make you question before you go absolutely to the limit. To rebuild the confidence to not keep room for things going wrong gets a little difficult. One way to go about it is to be delusional that bad things only happen to others. But I have done too much inner work for that to work for me, haha. My idea nowadays is to just indulge in the racing and forget everything else, shut off the brain by just enjoying the racing. I am always amazed after every race that I get to actually do this, compete at Nurburgring in such harmony with the racecar. I pinch myself. That excitement makes me forget all this. 

PD: What’s next for you? More podiums, or perhaps another bold venture off-track?

Akshay Gupta: For now, I want to win the overall title in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie. Which means beating 100+ cars. From there, I want to shift my focus to GT4 or TCR cars in more continental championships with a focus on Europe for the next 3-4 years and then move to the Americas and Asia. Of course, I want to win whatever championship I enter. 

Off the track, I recently started another venture in the world of automobiles. But my goal is very different this time around. I want to create quality employment for a million people in India. By that I mean good working conditions with health & safety, a salary that they truly deserve, health insurance for them & their family and probably good education for their kids. In India, we exploit our labour class and I would like to build a company that employs large amounts of labour to make the lives of a few of those individuals better. I want to dedicate the next two decades of my life towards this ambition.