Help me out, my FRiends, as I don't see it."
How else was Bernie supposed to pay for Tamara's mansions in London and Beverly Hills?
Or less tongue-in-cheek, for the same reason$ they built an F1 circuit 35 miles outside of New Delhi.
Buddh never stood a chinaman's chance of attracting the jetset crowd. First of all, Delhi is on the backside of beyond, a four hour flight from Dubai, eight hours from Paris and 14 hours from NYC. Second, it's one of the most polluted and impoverished large cities on the planet. Third, the races there were held in October, and Buddh is at about the same latitude as Orlando. Average daily high in October is ~85F.
Fourth, there wasn't a bespoke motor racing circuit IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. There were a couple of abandoned British air bases where they held impromptu amateur races, but India, on the whole, had next to NO grass roots support for motor racing. None.
And fifthly, it was a Hermann Tilke-designed circuit. Watching F1 at a Tilke track is only slightly more exciting than watching Galapagos tortoise drag races.
Just like COMMUNIST China, there was no reason to build an F1 circuit there. But Bernie did it anyway because he knew there was someone there with more money than sense who he could fleece. In this case it was the Jaypee development project, which spent $400 million on what I predicted would fail (because I'd been there) before the first spade-full of earth was turned.
And you can be sure that before Buddh began its inexorable march back to the desert from whence it came, Bernie had managed to make enough off the deal to buy his daughters matching Gulfstreams.
F1 stopped being about motorsports a long, long time ago. Bernie saved it from ruin but the sport sold its soul to him (and his successors) in exchange for profitability and world-wide exposure. Now it's reduced to WOKE spec-racing dedicated to the cause of saving humanity from its own exhaust.
By which I meant "respiratory" exhaust, not automobile exhaust.