THE WORLD'S FASTEST INDIAN

With 1900bhp, the Pininfarina Battista EV appears equipped to smash the Audi R8 Vio's Indian speed record. Hormazd Sorabjee tries to hold his nerve up to 360kph

There's no shortage of superlatives to describe Pininfarina's drop-dead gorgeous Battista. It's the T fastest, the most powerful, the most expensive and the heaviest supercar that I've ever driven.

For Mahindra, which gave the 'PFO' road car project the go-ahead after acquiring the famous Italian design house in 2015, the 1900bhp Battista is a matter of immense pride. This electric rocket has shot the home-grown Indian SUV specialist to the pinnacle of power and performance at the pointy end of the hyper-EV market.

Mahindra has always had big electric ambitions. It's the only Indian company to field a Formula E race team and in August last year unveiled a bold plan to launch five all-new, all-electric SUVs in the next four years.

Automobili Pininfarina is the Kohinoor of Mahindra's electric portfolio, and that's something Mahindra wants to talk about, even flaunt, which is why it brought the Battista to the Hyderabad round of the Formula E championship. And then we had an idea...

Since the car was already in India, why not have some fun of our own before shipping it back to Italy? And it doesn't get more OTT than maxing out the Battista to set some speed records at the state-of-theart new Natrax test facility, 400 miles from Hyderabad.

The pride of the sprawling 3000-acre site is its seven-mile high-speed track, the only one of its kind in Asia. Four lanes wide, with two long, shallow bankings connecting the 1.2-mile straights, this is India's temple of speed.