REAL TIME

Redefining speed in the fastest car made in India

- Kartik Ware

Time, as physicists will finger-waggingly have you know, is relative. Take for example, two vastly different quantities of time — on one hand, you have eight years and on the other, 11.05 seconds. Now, I haven’t really learnt a whole lot in the past eight years, so I have little hope of learning anything in 11.05 seconds. Or do I? Well, at least I now know that persistence will get me into trouble. This is the only time I’ve been scared for my life inside a car. Something as mad as this had to do it, of course, though I absolutely did not see it coming.

This is a story that began ten years ago in Bangalore. Ex-Motoring lady, Vaishali Dinakaran, and I had barged into the home of Pratap ‘Bobby’ Jayaram to feature the Jayaram GT, a homemade special that quite blew us away. Jayaram has been a part of virtually every electric automobile project in India, though it’s his trysts with internal combustion that are infinitely more interesting to me. And that late evening, it was something else in a dark garage that caught my eye.

It looked like a Maini Reva, one of the many electric cars Jayaram has worked on, but something was off. It had flared wheel arches and I could just about decipher the outline of a roll cage in it. When I asked what it was, he replied with one of his characteristic boisterous laughs, ‘Something to make people think!’ Pressed more, he said it was a project he had begun but had stopped work on for other things. ‘I have to have the time and money to blow away my time and money!’ It was a Reva, all right, but only in the loosest of senses. Sat in its tiny backside was a Suzuki Hayabusa motor. Whoa. A RevaBusa.