Sports India

Ameya Walavalkar (Mumbai), Aditya Akkineni, Akhil Khushlani (both Hyderabad) and Aditya Patel have been handpicked by Formula One driver Narain Karthikeyan for the NK Racing teams, which will compete in the Formula Rolon category of the JK Tyres National racing championships 2006, which will be held from August 20.

Kartik Shankar (Delhi) and Ajay Kini (Chennai) are the reserves of the team.

Narain, despite his busy schedule, spent almost four days before finalising the drivers for the teams - Amaron NK racing and Speed NK Racing.

The Williams F1 test driver had received nearly 200 applications and fourteen were shortlisted. Narain himself watched the boys, who had undergone trials at the Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore on Tuesday.

“I was solely responsible for the selection of these boys after a shoot-out in which twelve contenders participated. I have all the support from the sponsors Amaron, BPCL Speed and JK Tyres and all of them gave me a free hand,” Narain said.

He added that he had analysed the large amount of data collected during the shoot-out on Tuesday and also considered their past records and achievements and the teamwork skills before finalising the team.

He said he picked one driver with extensive experience in domestic racing as “His knowledge of Indian racing cars from the past seasons will prove to be a great asset to the team in it’s first year of operations. The others were selected based on their lap-times, consistency, natural ability, and their career performances to date.”

Ameya Walavalkar, the 23-year-old from Mumbai is the most experienced and the rest Aditya Akkineni (17 yrs), Aditya Patel (17 yrs) and Akhil Khushlani (16 yrs) are very promising drivers. The reserve drivers - Kartik Shankar (19 years) and Ajay Kini (17 years) will get the chance in case any main driver is unable to attend a race weekend.