This weekend Karun Chandhok will become only the second Indian driver to participate in a Formula 1 Grand Prix when he gets to race for Hispania Racing. He will be racing with Bruno Senna for the Spain-based team.

Securing a spot in the elite list of drivers by itself is a great achievement, but Karun Chandhok doesn’t have enough time to sit back and celebrate. The 2010 season of Formula 1 kicks off on March 12^thin Bahrain, just two weeks after his deal was signed with Hispania Racing. Bahrain Grand Prix will also mark the return of Michael Schumacher, the most skilled and the most feared driver of our times.

It is going to be very challenging for Chandhok in Bahrain as his team is still struggling to put the car together, leaving him no time for practice and testing. Going to a Grand Prix with a totally untested car is something that would bother even the best driver on earth.

“Well, the first race will just be like a test session. I must say Colin (team principal of Hispania) works more hours than most people I know and he has done an amazing job to get Dallara, Cosworth and all the people involved in work like mad and get the car ready for Bahrain.”, Chandhok said.

The Chennai lad seems to be taking everything in the right spirit and he is not expecting anything big in the initial stages.

“There will be problems. Even the established top teams have problems in the shakedowns and our shakedown will be FP1 (free practice) on Friday but we have to stay optimistic and battle through the first few races before we start to see some fruitful results. Early on, it will be very hard to get reliability as the other teams have done 8,000-10,000 km of testing and we haven’t even started the engines.”, he said.

The former GP2 driver believes that the first few races are just about finishing, getting reliability and gaining testing mileage, before aiming for something big.

“Hopefully by Barcelona we can start to fight to be the best of the new teams and by the end of the year start to mix with the likes of Torro Rosso”.