Meet 22-year-old Bengaluru-based Aishwarya Pissay, India’s international motorcycle track racer and cross-country and enduro rallyist. Not only did she win three national championship awards last year but also managed to finish both Raid de Himalaya and Dakshin Dare, two of India’s biggest motoring races, and clearly, there’s no stopping her. This commerce graduate, who has now been picked by TVS, has a choc-a-bloc schedule with almost 20 races a year.
Rallying one weekend and road racing the other, Aishwarya says racing is what makes her “feel alive”. Though she rides a TVS 200 Apache currently, she has her eyes firmly set on the RR 310. “The RR 310 excites me. Maybe this time I may try it,” she says.
How did it all begin for her? “I started at 18 with long rides and I did the longest ride from Rann of Kutch to Cherrapunji for ‘Chase the Monsoon’ on MTV which went on for about 24 days. After that I did a couple of rides called Saddlesore, which was 1,600 kms in 24 hours, and the Bun Burner which was 2,500 kms in 36 hours as a solo rider.” However, it was a friend who later suggested that she get into formal style of racing than kill herself on the streets, and that’s when she started racing with the Apex Racing Academy. But even then, she never knew that she would end up taking it up as a career.
It was after her first race in 2016 when she felt her performance wasn’t good enough, and the drive to do better gripped her. “I wanted to come back strong. So, after I said that to my coach, Jeeva, we put together a training schedule which included a lot of mental fitness and physical fitness, and involved going to the racetrack as often as I could, at least three days a week, starting from 8 am until 5 pm.” Her off-roading coach, Vishwas also helped her immensely during her first ever rally Dakshin Dare 2016, which was “one of the races that actually flipped my racing career over.” Vishwas not only helped Aishwarya in terms of training her for off-road riding, but he also helped her get sponsors and that’s what kick-started her rallying career.
After TVS picked her up in 2017, it’s been a pretty good year with her winning three championships already. “TVS doesn’t really bother their riders, they give them the space and the best thing about racing for a factory team is that you just have to make sure that you give your 100 per cent on the bike,” she says.
Aishwarya knows only too well that her career is all about different aspects put together, from mental conditioning to nutrition to fitness. “It’s all about when you go to sleep, when you wake up as well as function fitness and mental conditioning,” she says. Now, Aishwarya has enrolled with Invictus Performance Lab that technically specify athletes and does multiple tests which includes a lot of mental conditioning, physical conditioning and nutrition. Besides, there’s also the need for lots of saddle time.
Food and nutrition also play an important role, says Aishwarya, a green tea addict. Though her new diet hadn’t started when THE WEEK interviewed her, she says that she tries to eat clean and healthy. “Our body lacks a lot of things that we don’t realise, and we need to make sure that we’re taking proper food because sometimes we over-train and it matters to eat the proper nutrients.” So, she has supplements and whey proteins which help her during her race weekends.
“During a race weekend, I don't talk to anybody because it helps me focus. All I would do is take a map and may be a pen, listen to music and visualise what I want to do there. I would do the same things that I want to replicate out there, so that’s one of the key things that I do in terms of mental conditioning that helps me focus,” says Aishwarya. She likes listening to 'Eye of the Tiger' by Survivor, 'Girl on Fire' by Alicia Keys, and 'Woman' by Kesha.
Aishwarya has been associated with the brand Alpine Star of late, but says that until then TVS was providing her the best of the best gear for racing “because safety comes first, irrespective of the rider”. She should know because 12 races down in 2016, Aishwarya had a major accident where she broke her collar bone in three pieces.
“They put a plate and seven screws and I had a race in about six days. I had no option but to get up and race,” Aishwarya says, who had two races to go. She displayed sheer willpower and went for it, and her mother, Deepika, was okay with it, she recalls. “I won the race. My doctor found out through newspapers and was surprised.”
Aishwarya is not one to forget to acknowledge the support of the entire team that has rallied behind her in order to make her victories happen. “They all made it happen,” she says recalling how Raid wouldn’t have been possible “without their motivation, and fixing my bike as brand new each time in those temperatures”.
What next? “Dakar is definitely a dream which requires training and skill, and I am definitely preparing for it,” she says.