The VJM01's lineage stretched back to the Spyker F8-VII, the sole car Spyker F1 constructed entirely under their own stewardship after acquiring the struggling Midland F1 team partway through 2006. The F8-VII had scored a single championship point across the entire 2007 season, delivered by Adrian Sutil at the Japanese Grand Prix in the improved B-specification car. When Indian businessman Vijay Mallya purchased the team from Spyker during 2007 and rebranded it as Force India, the B-spec chassis provided the immediate basis for the new constructor's first racer.
The VJM01's designation followed a different logic from its predecessor. Where the Spyker naming scheme referenced the Dutch manufacturer's aviation heritage and cylinder count, the VJM initials were a direct tribute to the ownership group. Initial 2008 testing was completed in relivered F8-VIIB hulls before the definitive VJM01 specification made its testing debut on 25 February 2008 at Silverstone.
Because Force India inherited the Spyker technical infrastructure rather than building a new car from scratch, the VJM01 was closely related to the F8-VIIB in its aerodynamic package, chassis architecture, and mechanical layout. The team continued to use Ferrari power — specifically the 2007-specification Ferrari 056 V8 — as the cost of sourcing the current-season 2008 Ferrari engine was prohibitive. The retention of year-old power units placed the team at a structural disadvantage compared to rivals running contemporary specification engines.
Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil were retained from the 2007 Spyker roster, providing continuity in driver feedback and setup knowledge accumulated with the previous car.
The VJM01's competitive output reflected the car's origins as a hasty conversion of an already uncompetitive package. Points were not scored across the season, and Force India finished at the bottom of the Constructors' Championship standings — the only team placed lower than them, Super Aguri, had withdrawn from the championship entirely after just four races.
Despite the lack of points, one performance stood out. At the Monaco Grand Prix, Force India came close to a fourth-place finish, Sutil running strongly before contact with Kimi Räikkönen's Ferrari in the closing stages ended his race. The near-miss illustrated the car's potential on a circuit where outright power is less decisive, and it offered an early indication of the racecraft that Sutil would develop into headline-making results in the following season.
The VJM01 served primarily as a bridge between eras, allowing the renamed and refinanced Force India team to establish itself as a constructor while preparing a genuinely new car for 2009. Its racing history also gained a secondary footnote in 2011, when Force India partnered with the artist Dexter Brown to produce an art car. The chosen chassis was VJM01-05 — the same car Giancarlo Fisichella had raced in sixteen of the eighteen 2008 rounds — which was painted by hand and auctioned for charity at the inaugural Indian Grand Prix. The exercise underlined how, even within a modest debut season, the VJM01 had acquired a place in the story of Indian-backed motor racing.