The Charlotte, N.C.-based Formula One upstart US F1 has finally given us a look inside its facility, a significant step toward dispelling any lingering doubt about the project’s legitimacy.

Housed in the old Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR team shop, the team–as seen in these photos–has a design office up and running, along with a machine shop, carbon-fiber-baking autoclave, multi-axis CNC machines and rapid prototyping machine.

Spearheaded by engineer Ken Anderson and longtime F1 journalist, team employee and TV personality Peter Windsor, US F1 insists it will be on the grid at the season-opening race in Bahrain on March 14. Anderson and Windsor have secured backing from YouTube co founder and CEO Chad Hurley, who they announced as a third partner in August.

Though US F1 does not expect to test a car on the track until next year, it has an engine-supply deal with Cosworth. Anderson said he expects a real-life car to emerge in November.  There is still no word on drivers, though F1 veterans Pedro de la Rosa and Alex Wurz have been linked to the project, along with young Americans Jonathan Summerton and John Edwards, who compete in the Atlantic Championship, and J. R. Hildebrand, the 2009 Indy Lights champion.

Windsor told AutoWeek recently that while he wants to ultimately feature two American drivers, it is likely that he will initially sign the two drivers who he feels can best meet the team’s initial development needs, regardless of nationality. Several other experienced F1 drivers are without race seats for next year, including Anthony Davidson and Sébastien Bourdais.

Meanwhile, Anderson – who has been the less visible of the two team bosses, if for no other reason than Windsor’s Speed TV gig – took time on Wednesday to answer some basic questions. The Q&A was provided by US F1.

Q: Ken, we’re hearing about a lot of activity in Charlotte these days. What is going on at the US F1 Team?

It has been quite a ride since we started the team last year, and has become far more intense since the signing of the Concorde Agreement. Our world headquarters is now complete and fully functional, and the 2010 race car is in the construction phase.

USF1.com has put a new “Coming Soon” splash image on their site, and it has created quite a bit of buzz about the first Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) photos coming out of the Team US F1 camp.

USF1’s first chassis had been revealed on a SPEEDTV webcast. The CFD images of the new machine were shown to viewers of the Wind Tunnel program in the USA during an interview with the teams key players. Anderson revealed that the new car should be in a rolling condition this month, when more detailed technical work will be carried out.

There have been widespread rumors recently surrounding the new teams progress yet as these images show design work is reasonably advanced.

Rear Diffuser Turbulence

Today Ferrari has announced a three year deal starting next season with 2005 and 2006 World Champion Fernando Alonso. The confirmation of the agreement from the Italian team has been widely expected for several weeks.  The most successful active driver in F1, Alonso allegedly signed his Ferrari contract as long ago as July 2008, according to sources close to the team.

Kimi Raikkonen, although his contract covered the 2010 season, will no longer be a Ferrari driver.

“The Scuderia’s driver line-up next season will therefore be made up of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso, with Giancarlo Fisichella in the role of reserve driver,” Ferrari’s statement reads.

“Kimi Raikkonen will leave the team at the end of this current season, after what has been a rewarding and fruitful partnership, which saw him win the Drivers’ title in 2007. He also played a key role in Ferrari’s taking of the Constructor’s title that same year and in 2008.”

Ferrari was obviously very keen to bring 28-year-old Spaniard Alonso aboard, as it has long been obvious that both parties hold mutual interest.  ”We are very proud to welcome to our team another winning driver, who has demonstrated his amazing talent by winning two World Championships in his career to date,” said Team principal Stefano Domenicali.

“Of course, we wish to thank Kimi for everything he has done during his time with Ferrari: in his first year with us, he managed to win the Drivers’ title, thus making his contribution to Ferrari’s history and he played a vital role in our taking of the Constructors’ title in 2007 and 2008,” Domenicali continued, also pointing out Raikkonen’s victory in Belgium this year in what is a difficult season for the team.

“With common consent, we have agreed to terminate the contract binding me to Ferrari to the end of 2010, one year ahead of schedule,” said Raikkonen. “I am very sad to be leaving a team with which I have spent three fantastic years, during which time I won plenty of races. Together, we have won 50% of the world titles in that period and I managed to take the Drivers’ title in 2007, thus achieving the target I had set myself at the start of my career.

“I have always felt at home with everyone here and I will have many happy memories of my time with the team,” the 2007 champion concluded.  Raikkonen will complete the three remaining races of the season with Ferrari. It is rumored the Finn may return to McLaren Mercedes.

The announcement of Fernando Alonso’s move to Ferrari should now open the vanes of the drivers’ market, with a cascade effect leading to further driver confirmations from other teams in the coming days and weeks.

New York Times Article: “The Making of a U.S. Formula One Team” (Re-post from nytimes.com)

The story of the new American team that will race in Formula One next season really begins in 1985. That’s when Honda was supplying its wonderful turbo engines to the Williams team and I was working for Frank Williams as his manager of sponsorship and public affairs.

We luxuriated in the 48,000 square feet, or 4,460 square meters, of the new Williams factory in Didcot, England, south of Oxford — a new facility that included a special Honda engine test area and a one-third scale wind tunnel that had originated at a company in northeastern England, Specialized Mouldings. There, in 1977, Peter Wright and Colin Chapman had discovered the principle now called “ground effect.” At the time, that wind tunnel was the equal of anything in the world.

My office was conveniently placed near the parking lot, which meant that I could watch the ceaseless comings and goings of a Formula One team. It was not long before I noticed the regular appearance of a stocky man in jeans who always headed toward the wind tunnel, a briefcase in hand.

A few inquiries revealed that he was Ken Anderson, a young American engineer who worked for Penske Racing, running their new shock-absorber department. Anderson had started with motocross bikes in the United States, but quickly joined the rapidly expanding Fox shock-absorber company. He then formed a successful working relationship with an off-road racer, Roger Mears, winning major desert events with him before working miracles at the Indy 500.

Soon word was out: Penske’s Rick Mears, Roger’s brother, wanted to know about these amazing Fox shock absorbers that were enabling his brother to run so fast. Roger Penske then hired Anderson to set up a Penske shock-absorber company.

Penske shock absorbers quickly became a mainstay of Formula One. But back in 1985, Williams was the only team using them, on the FW10-Honda; in return for the shock absorbers, Williams allowed Penske to use its wind tunnel for development of its British-built Indy car. Thus Anderson’s regular visits to the Williams factory.

Anderson and I became good friends. We quickly discovered that we loved the same things — Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, for example, and the details of the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space missions. We began to talk about putting our own race team together — first in the United States (with an Indy Racing League team in the mid-1990s) and, more recently, a Formula One team.

Anderson first contacted me about his Formula One idea in 2006. He had built the Falcon IndyCar in 2002 in Charlotte, North Carolina (the car never raced because of a sudden change in the I.R.L./IndyCar engine regulations) and he was now working as an engineer at Haas/C.N.C. Racing, a Nascar team financed by Gene Haas. Anderson said that he had convinced Haas to finance the design and construction of a full-scale, rolling-road wind tunnel in North Carolina and that he, Anderson, was going to manage the project. If he could pull that off, he promised, then a Formula One team would be the next step.

The young German race car driver Jackie Weiss met up with USF1’s Peter Windsor at the Grand Prix in Valencia. In a short on-the-go interview, Windsor speaks about the new Formula 1 Team, USF1, and criticizes the American support for young American drivers with Formula 1 as their goal. (Translated from speed-magazine.de)

Q: My question is about your drivers for the US F1 Formula One Team. I know you are doing the Grand Prix Shootout and then you will push the Youngsters all the way up. And you want to do this for the other crew members like mechanics and engineers too, I heard…

Peter Windsor: [he thinks a second] You know what? It’s a good idea…but: no, we haven´t planned on doing this on mechanics and engineers. Most of our mechanics and engineers for our race team will be guys that are very new to formula one. They all are going to be American, and they all have experience from the United States. We believe there are a lot of pretty good guys there. There is a whole bunch of them already keen to come into the formula one, into the system of formula one and do a good job. All of that team will be American. And the same applies to the engineers. What I just said.

As far as drivers go. Personally I have always loved trying to help young drivers and find young drivers and talent. And I do that at quite a young age, with Nigel Mansell.

I discovered Nigel when he was in Formula 3. And I took him all the way up to the Formula 1. And I believe I can do that with other drivers too. Because we are doing an American Team I think it’s pretty logical and fair that we should focus on finding young Americans. But if I can also help drivers others nationality, not as certain in our team, but giving them advice and maybe helping them with sponsorship or whatever. I’d love to be able to do that. And certainly with a grand prix shootout, you mentioned that some very, very talented young drivers from Europe showed up in the first round – I love to be able to help them. I am not sure how I can, but I hope I can, in some form.

Q: I do have one more question about the reaction. You probably got a lot of Fan emails from the whole United States. Is it all positive, or are there some critics, and people who doubt?

Bob Varsha of SPEED TV fame, fueled the Team US F1 rumor mill this last week by making the claim that next year’s livery might very well play off the same blue and white livery as Dan Gurney’s Eagle Westlake T1G that won the 1967 Belgium Grand Prix.  Gurney’s win at Spa is the only victory for an American in an American Grand Prix car in the modern era, a fact not lost on Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor.

Skip to 9:25 below to hear Bob’s comments from the Singapore Grand Prix round table on SPEED.

Following last week’s developments it now looks like there could be as many as 14 teams racing in Formula 1 in 2010.  It would be fantastic to see a 28-car Formula 1 grid, but is it really likely? I’m not sure.

Back in the dark days of the budget cap row, the FIA opened a tender to allow three new teams in. As we are all aware, they named USF1, Campos Meta 1 and Manor Motorsport as the entries.  Then, when BMW announced it was pulling out of the sport and declined to sign the new Concorde Agreement, the tender process was re-opened for another team. Just recently the Malaysian government-backed Lotus project was named as the winner.  However the FIA also declared itself impressed with the quality of a re-application put forward by the buyers of the BMW team, backed by a Swiss investment foundation called “Qadbak”.  It has said the team will have first refusal on any further vacancies that should arise, and will try to have the entry list expanded to 14 teams for 2010 to accommodate them.

This last point is interesting because the FIA clearly believes it is possible under the new Concorde Agreement to increase the entry from 26 to 28, but not to allow teams to run a third car, which Mosley dismissed as “fantasy” earlier this month.  Getting the other teams to agree to a 14th entrant might not be easy as it means less room at the tracks and more competition for points, prize money and sponsorship. However, a 14th team might not be necessary if other entries are pulled.

Who could drop out?

Renault today appeared before an extraordinary meeting of the FIA World Motor Sport Council (WMSC) to face charges relating to the “crash-gate” affair. After the hearing in Paris, which lasted just 90 minutes, the WMSC handed down a rapid verdict.

Renault received a permanent disqualification from the sport, but this is suspended until the end of 2011. Former team boss Flavio Briatore has been banned from FIA-sanctioned events for an unlimited period and Ex-engineering director Pat Symonds has also been excluded for five years.

Managing director Flavio Briatore and executive director of engineering Pat Symonds were both implicated ahead of today’s hearing and had already left the team as the French car giant said they would not contest the charges. Also, the FIA agreed not to pursue action against Piquet in return for his role in uncovering the details of the scandal.

“Furthermore, (the FIA) does not intend to renew any Superlicence granted to any driver who is associated (through a management contract or otherwise) with Mr. Briatore, or any entity or individual associated with Mr. Briatore. In determining that such instructions should be applicable for an unlimited period, the World Motor Sport Council has had regard not only to the severity of the breach in which Mr. Briatore was complicit but also to his actions in continuing to deny his participation in the breach despite all the evidence.”

Briatore’s firm, FFBB, currently manages Heikki Kovalainen and Mark Webber as well as Renault Development Drivers such as Romain Grosjean and Lucas di Grassi.

While Briatore has been banned from the sport indefinitely with Symonds handed a five year ban, Fernando Alonso “was not in any way involved in Renault F1’s breach of the regulations,” and Nelson Piquet Jr. was immune from sanctions after giving evidence to the FIA.

(Re-post from USF1.com)
I guess it all began on the morning of Wed, Feb 4, when I awoke in my San Francisco hotel room – box, in reality, featuring a wall-to-wall bed – to find 35 emails on my BlackBerry.

The story had broken. USF1 was on the internet. There were emails from friends and family – but there were also a number of emails from journalists worldwide, all of whom wanted “the full story” and “all the background”. All wanted – expected – an immediate response. And so arose in me a feeling of nausea. For a couple of years now, Ken Anderson and I had been signing potential associates to NDAs – to non-disclosure agreements – and, as time had gone on, so our confidence in that legal document had risen. Despite the cyberspace traffic between everyone involved in USF1, the press never seemed to grab the story. We seemed to be safe.
Safe?

Looking back, I guess the main reason for wanting to keep things quiet was because USF1 from the start was so new, and so different, in concept. Long before the current economic recession, we were thinking “lean, mean and Skunk Works”. We were questioning why the existing F1 teams needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in not winning races; and we were convinced that not only could an F1 could be designed and built in the USA but also that we could base the team in America, too.

We also knew about F1 politics – about the “not invented here” syndrome and the “more money” mantra, as in, “when in doubt, spend more”. During the “boom” times of 2006-07 – funny how just ordinary times suddenly become the “boom” days in the light of a recession! – we knew that we were so far away from mainstream thinking that the eyes of most F1 “experts” would glaze over long before we’d finished delivering our plans.

So for that reason we wanted to keep our profile low. Also, it’s a fair bet in F1 that half-leaked information enables most people to add two and two and get four hundred and ninety-seven. In other words, there was a clear argument for waiting as long as possible before we went public.
When to go public? That was relatively simple: we needed to be accepted by F1’s governing body, the FIA, and we needed to be sufficiently capitalized to be truly solid. Until then, we would lie low.

A transcript of the conversations between Renault team bosses, engineers and driver Nelson Piquet Jr. during last year’s Singapore Grand Prix has been published, adding to the speculation over claims that Piquet was told to crash deliberately in order to aid the chances of his team-mate Fernando Alonso, who went on to win the race.

Yesterday, Renault’s director of engineering, Pat Symonds, was granted immunity in the FIA’s investigation into the incident if he agrees to provide details of the alleged plan.

Now the Times newspaper has published details of the interactions between Symonds, two Renault engineers and crucially, Flavio Briatore, the team principal, who has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing on behalf of the driver and the team. In the radio communication, Briatore swears repeatedly and says that Piquet is “not a driver” following the now notorious crash, before later asking: “Is Nelson OK?”

“I can tell you now we are not three-stopping,” Symonds is heard to say on the transcript made by the FIA, the sport’s world governing body.

Later Symonds says to an engineer: “Don’t worry about fuel because I’m going to get him (Alonso) out of this traffic earlier than that.”

Piquet says: “What lap are we in, what lap are we in?”

A Renault engineer then reports: “He just asked: ‘What lap are we in?’”

Symonds replies: “Yeah, tell him that he’s about to complete lap eight.”

Symonds insists Piquet is then told something he should know from his pit board, which is shown to him at the end of every lap. “No, just tell him, he is about, he’s just completing, he’s about to complete lap eight.”

Symonds then says: “Right, I’m going to…I think we’re going to stop him just before we catch him (a reference to the Williams driver Kazuki Nakajima, who was ahead of Alonso) and get him out of it, the reason being we’ve still got this worry on the fuel pump. It’s only a couple of laps short. We’re going to be stopping him early and we’re going to go to lap 40.”

An unnamed engineer asks a few minutes later: “Pat, do you still not think that this is a bit too early? We only did six tenths that lap.”

Symonds replies: “No, no it’s going to be all right.”

“OK, OK, understood,” the engineer says.