A petition to cancel the 2013 Indian Grand Prix due to unpaid fees from last year was supposed to be heard by the Indian courts. The Indian Grand Prix is on Sunday. And now the Indian courts have delayed the petition to cancel the race to next week, after the race has happened. Uhhhhh.
This petition has been brewing for quite a while, when a man by the name ofoo Amit Kumar argued that F1 is not just a sport, but is also entertainment. That means they shouldn't be exempt from taxes levied on entertainment endeavors in India. F1 was exempt, and Kumar was pissed.
India was set to hear the petition before the race weekend, and it feasibly could have cancelled the race, though I tend to doubt that would have happened anyway. But moving the petition to cancel the race to a time after the race has been run, well, isn't that a slap in the face to Kumar and his cause?
The good news for Kumar, if you look at it from his side, is that only 40,000 of the 100,000 seats for Sunday's race have been sold and India will not be on the F1 calendar in 2014. They insist it'll be back in 2015, but financial troubles might make that difficult.
So Sunday's race will go off without a hitch, and barring something crazy, Sebastian Vettel will be crowned champion for the fourth year in a row. All he has to do is finish in the top five, which he's pretty good at doing.