Raise your hand if you were waiting to turn 18 just to get your driver’s license and take your dad’s car for a spin. Sneha Sharma’s case wasn’t very different. But here’s a fun fact. At 18, she had her flying license and her racing license, even before being licensed to drive a car on the road. That wouldn’t be much of a shocker to us right now, considering that we know Sneha as India’s fastest woman F4 racer.
A speaker at TEDxGLIMChennai, this 29-year-old Flight Commander at Indigo recently represented India at the W Series trials in Austria. Here’s a thing about this racer. Half the time, she’s racing cars and during the other half, she’s flying aeroplanes. So naturally, we wanted to know what she prefers — to be on land or in the sky? She says, “Racing is my first love. But I love flying too. They both deal with heavy speed machines and you’re required to make quick decisions. But the only difference is that, in the latter, you have to make sure the others’ lives are safe too.”
Do you know that despite being a successful racer for the past 12 years, Sneha’s family still doesn’t let her drive a car? “They don’t trust me on the road,” she laughs. She also shares her journey as a racer, while she was training to be a pilot. “My family thought it was dangerous for me to race and we often got into fights. It was understandable because they’d taken loans to fund my studies.
But I made sure that racing didn’t affect my studies. Whenever I got time, I’d jump a wall and go race. As I started managing the two together, my parents figured out that they can take the girl out of racing, not racing out of the girl and let me go ahead,” she says. So how does this super racer make sure that she manages her work and her racing career? Sneha thinks she’s a bit too crazy that way. “Earlier, it was difficult for me to concentrate on racing because of my job. But my company supports me. I’m lucky that way,” she signs off.
