On Thursday, the Indian Supreme Court agreed to study a demand filed by an activist to call off the race Sunday because he claims the local organizer has not paid the entertainment tax for the 2012 race. The case relates to a court order two years ago asking the organizers to freeze 25 percent of ticket revenues until they had settled a tax dispute with the state government of Uttar Pradesh, where the track is.  The extreme step of a cancellation is unlikely to happen so quickly, however, given the complexity of the issue and the timing.  “The reality is, if in 12 months time we can go back to Formula One and say that the government may not be helping, but they are not hindering anymore, then it might be more incentive for Formula One to come back,” Chandhok said.  He points out that 10 days after the Grand Prix, India will host a match in Chennai to decide the world chess title. It pits Viswanathan Anand, an Indian who is the reigning world champion, against Magnus Carlsen of Norway, the highest-rated player in the world, and it is considered a sporting event.  “The previous sports minister said ‘Formula One is not a sport, it is entertainment,”’ Chandhok said. “Sports today has to be entertaining, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be both. I’ve tried very hard in various Indian TV channel interviews to define that.  “To me the definition of sport is people competing against each other in a physical activity,” he added. “There is a competition, someone wins and someone loses, and it is a physical activity. So therefore, I can’t get how chess is a sport; in India they classify chess as a sport but not Formula One.”  Romain Grosjean, a driver at the Lotus team, agreed.  “They should get into the car to see if it’s a sport,” he said of Indian officials. “It’s a sport because it demands outsized concentration, it demands an excellent physical condition, it demands reflexes, coordination, work.  “It is clearly a sport,” he added, “and if you take the average heart rate of most drivers throughout a Grand Prix, it’s around 150, 160, and if you think that it’s around the same as running for an hour and a half — if you consider running a sport, then so is Formula One.”  The elite series has steadily grown in popularity in India since broadcasts of it began on Indian television in the 1990s. There have been two Indian Formula One drivers over the years, Chandhok and Narain Karthikeyan, and since 2007 there has been an Indian team, Force India, owned by two Indian billionaires.  “It would be a big letdown for Sahara Force India if we lost the Indian Grand Prix,” said Paul di Resta, a driver at the team. “It’s obviously very close to who we are, it’s a home Grand Prix, our Indian investors and board members are all from there. There is no other Formula One car named after a country like we are, and it’s like that for a reason.  “We like to go represent our car and our team there,” he added, “as there are a lot of Indian people interested in what we do. The fans and the people in India are very special people, they are very warm people.”  The race was well attended in its first two years, with 110,000 spectators the first year. There were fewer the second year, but it outsold other new Formula One venues, including Bahrain, China, Malaysia, South Korea and Turkey.  “I think it will be very difficult once when you leave a country to come back to it, especially where we have not really managed to establish the sport,” said Monisha Kaltenborn, director of the Swiss-based Sauber team, who was born and raised in India. “I think in the first year we had the benefit of something new coming in there and there was a tremendous amount of in-depth coverage.  “That was less in the second year, and then the critics came up about the event, and whether it is really a sporting event,” she added. “And then people put up issues like the tax and the difficulties many people faced in coming.  “Now I think it is a bit like giving up, when you know that you are not planning to be here the next year, maybe the interest has gone down,” she said. “But I imagine it could go either way.”  Some other team directors view the red tape as simply an obstacle that must be overcome in a series that seeks worldwide exposure and events.  “We would never single out any single country or event and say that we are going to work around the authorities or any of the natural systems that they have,” said Jonathan Neale, managing director of the McLaren Mercedes team. “It’s part of the challenge of racing around the globe — communications, infrastructure, coming through the authorities, tax regimes — it is all part of the rich tapestry of racing.”  Chandhok also noted that the race brings business to the teams.  “What other race brought one-race sponsorship deals to seven teams?” he said, referring to deals in which local sponsors bought space on the cars at seven teams over the two years, including the poorer Sauber, Marussia and HRT teams. “It didn’t happen in China.”  But Kaltenborn disagreed, particularly as India remains a priority market for existing team sponsors and the car manufacturers in the sport, such as Renault.  “I think that has been the problem, that we have not been able to market ourselves properly in India,” she said. “We have not been able to convince that many Indian companies. You can count the companies that are in Formula One since then on one hand; we need more. And I think somewhere collectively maybe we have failed to do more there.”  On the number of fans who show up and have an interest in Formula One in India, she was level-headed, alluding to the country’s population of 1.2 billion: “You have to keep in mind that to get 100,000 people in India on one sport, that is not difficult — if you compare that, let’s say, to Switzerland.  “In India, I think we had a very good start,” she added, “and people were genuinely keen to understand more. But we have somewhere failed to keep that up, and we got more lost in all the controversies, especially with the tax issue and things like that.”  An earlier version of this article misstated the nationality of the chess player Magnus Carlsen. He is Norwegian, not Danish.
As the country prepares for its third annual Formula One race this weekend, a governmental issue is now threatening to make it the last one.