He didn’t even have a driving license.
People forget that part first. On March 10, 1985, Ravi Shastri, twenty-two years old, climbed into a metallic gold Audi 100 parked near the boundary of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, checked there was fuel in the tank, and turned the key anyway.
He had no business driving that car, not in Australia, not later on Indian roads. Mohinder Amarnath sprawled himself across the bonnet. Wicketkeeper Sadanand Viswanath climbed onto the roof, his spiked boots scraping the gold paint every time the car hit a bump. The rest of the squad piled in and hung out of the windows as Shastri took a lap that would end up outliving the tournament itself.
Back home, cars like this simply did not exist. India barely had cars, period.
A country still asking permission to want things
To understand why one automobile turned into a national event, you need to picture India in 1985. This was the License Raj, an economy run on permits, quotas and waiting lists. Buying a scooter could take years off your life.
Roads belonged to two or three models: the Hindustan Ambassador, the Premier Padmini, and by then, the newly launched Maruti 800. Foreign cars weren’t really sold here. They existed in film scenes and secondhand stories, not in showrooms.
So when a West German sedan showed up on Indian television, driven by an Indian cricketer, something moved. Not the economy, not yet. Just people’s sense of what they were allowed to dream about.
The tournament behind it all
The car was a prize at the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Championship of Cricket, held in Australia to mark 150 years since European settlement in Victoria. Every Test-playing side turned up: Australia, England, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the West Indies.
Bookmakers fancied the West Indies. India, still riding the glow of their 1983 World Cup win but not really expected to repeat anything, were something of an afterthought.
They won every single game. Five matches, five wins, under Sunil Gavaskar’s captaincy. They beat Pakistan, thrashed England by 86 runs, brushed aside hosts Australia by eight wickets, then cruised past New Zealand in the semifinal at Sydney.
The final against Pakistan, played at the MCG on March 10, pulled in 35,296 spectators, still the biggest crowd for an Australian international that didn’t involve Australia.
Pakistan batted first and stumbled early against Kapil Dev, slipping to 29 for 3, before recovering to 176 for 9 on the back of Javed Miandad’s 48 and Imran Khan’s 35. It wasn’t nearly enough.
India chased it down inside 48 overs, Krishnamachari Srikkanth smashing 67, Shastri holding one end together with an unbeaten 63. India won by eight wickets. Wisden would later call that squad the Indian Team of the Century.
Srikkanth walked away with Player of the Match. Shastri walked away with something bigger, Player of the Tournament, a title the organisers had grandly billed as “Champion of Champions.”
Across five games he scored 182 runs at an average of 45.5, three fifties on the trot, and picked up 8 wickets bowling tidy left-arm spin. Even by the standards of the format’s early years, it was a rare kind of all-round campaign.
A joke that turned into fuel
Before the final, word had already gone around both camps that whoever was named best player of the tournament would take home a car. Javed Miandad, never one to let an opportunity for banter pass, told Shastri the car was as good as won by someone from Pakistan.
Shastri’s answer has survived four decades: “Take a walk… I am wanting that car more than anything else.”
Sounds like locker-room chatter. In hindsight, it was also a pretty honest line about where sport was heading. Winning wasn’t just about pride anymore. It was starting to come with a price tag attached.
Getting the car home was harder than winning it
Winning the Audi turned out to be the simple bit. Getting it into the country was a different fight altogether, and this is where the story stops being about cricket and turns into something closer to policy drama.
Import duty on foreign cars in 1985 sat somewhere between 150 and 300 percent of the vehicle’s value. On a car worth around AUD $35,000, that worked out to a tax bill well past INR 50 lakh, a sum no young cricketer could realistically produce at that time.
The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act made things worse still, since Shastri couldn’t just settle the bill using money earned abroad. Without the right permits, the car risked being impounded at customs for good, a trophy nobody could actually drive.
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stepped in personally. He instructed the Central Board of Excise and Customs to waive the duty altogether, letting the Audi in as a kind of national asset rather than a private purchase.
It’s worth sitting with that for a second. A government that decided how many scooters its own citizens could buy chose, for one gold sedan, to step outside its own rulebook. That decision travelled further than any advertisement could have. Win big enough, and apparently even the system finds a way to bend.
Ten thousand people just to look
When the ship carrying the car finally reached Mumbai, over 10,000 people showed up at the docks just to see it. Not to touch it, not to sit inside it. Just to look.
Shastri, still licenseless and wary of Mumbai’s traffic, had an Audi executive drive the car home to his place in Mahim. For years after, neighbours grew used to seeing him take it out on quiet Sunday mornings, one of the only Audis in the entire country, driven by pretty much the only person who had ever won one.
Spare parts became the real headache eventually, one no prime ministerial order could fix. Nobody in India stocked components for a German sedan from the early 1980s. The car aged badly, broke down more often, and sat idle for close to ten years.
In 2021, Gautam Singhania, chairman of the Raymond Group, offered to restore it at his Super Car Club Garage in Thane. His team spent nearly a year on the job, stripping the car down to its frame, rebuilding the engine and wiring, and importing original parts from Europe.
On June 3, 2022, Singhania handed it back to Shastri, restored, gold paint gleaming again, the scratches Viswanath’s boots had left in 1985 finally gone. Shastri called it a national asset belonging to the whole team, not to him alone.
Why one car started an industry
Before 1985, Indian athletes endorsed things people already bought anyway. Gavaskar sold suitings and shoe polish. Kapil Dev sold shaving cream and a malt drink. These deals were modest and entirely local, mostly because foreign products couldn’t legally be sold in India at all.
The Audi broke that pattern, without anyone really planning for it to. It gave Indian television viewers their first look at an athlete claiming something purely aspirational instead of useful. Not a fridge, not a scooter. A luxury sedan from a country most Indians would never get to visit.
That image did its work slowly, in the background. When India opened up its economy in 1991, and satellite television followed soon after, the ground had already been prepared without anyone quite noticing.
Sachin Tendulkar signed a multi-crore deal with WorldTel in 1995 and became the face of Pepsi, Visa, eventually BMW. The IPL, launched in 2008, turned cricketers into full brand portfolios instead of single sponsorship deals.
MS Dhoni built a following that stretched across small towns and corporate boardrooms at the same time. Virat Kohli, more recently, became the face of Audi India itself, a partnership that owes its roots to a car nobody at the company’s Indian office had signed off on, mainly because there was no Indian office yet.
Audi didn’t formally enter India until 2007. For the 22 years before that, its best advertisement here was a gold sedan doing laps of an Australian cricket ground, and later, quiet Sunday drives through the lanes of Mahim.
What the numbers say today
As per KPMG report, India’s organised sports sponsorship market is worth around INR 16,633 crore now, with cricket alone making up roughly 85 percent of it. Total athlete endorsement value stands near INR 1,224 crore, and a player like Kohli reportedly earns somewhere between INR 150 and 250 crore a year across his various deals.
As per this report of FirstPost, The IPL itself is valued at close to $20 billion. None of this would have meant much in 1985, when a cricketer’s real salary came from match fees and a steady government job at a bank or an airline.
Financial Express has not independently verified these numbers.
The distance between those two worlds is really the whole story here. It’s the gap between a country that had to waive import taxes to let one foreign car through, and a country whose biggest cricket league now sells broadcast rights for tens of crores per match.
A lap that never quite ended
Shastri still takes that Audi out occasionally, decades later, license presumably sorted by now. When people bring it up, he doesn’t talk much about horsepower or design. He talks about the crowd that day at the MCG, about Amarnath on the bonnet, about Miandad’s joke and the reply he gave back.
The car was never really about the car. It was about a country watching one of its own claim something it had spent decades being told it couldn’t have yet.
Everything that followed, the endorsement deals, the league valuations, the crore-figure contracts, grew out of that one reckless, unlicensed lap around a cricket ground on the other side of the world.