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?

(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.

Hungry for Success – Exclusive Interview with Peter Windsor (Re-post from Formula1.com)
The US-based operation founded by Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson is one of three new teams due to join the grid for 2010. With their debut season rapidly approaching, more and more pieces of the jigsaw are falling into place for Team US, not least the recent announcement of YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley as a major backer. It brought the Charlotte-based squad to the attention of global media – and Windsor hopes it won’t be the last time…

Q: Peter, now that all the formalities are wrapped up, there must be no holding back at your Charlotte factory in North Carolina. Where are things with the car and team development right now?

Peter Windsor: Well, all the politics that happened this year have delayed us in some respects, but not in the critical respect of the car. We’ve been working on the design and the construction of the car since the start of the year, so that hasn’t been delayed at all. We are right on schedule for that. As (team co-founder) Ken (Anderson) said a couple of weeks ago, we should soon have what Americans call a ‘roller’ – not a complete car, but basically the chassis, with the suspension and gearbox in place – ready to do some full-scale aero tests. Then we are ready for the final bodywork around October and, like with everybody else, our car will be ready for the first test in January. There is no other deadline we have to meet.

If you are a new team and you don’t have in place existing cars, drivers, factories and everything else. When you are a start-up operation it is very important from a marketing point of view to get all the hardware in place as quickly as possible. Due to all the politics we’ve slipped a bit on time and now we are making up for that and working very hard on the marketing side of the company. The first phase of that was the announcement of our involvement with Chad Hurley. From there we will be ‘all hands on deck’ and marketing the team as what we are: an American team with a franchise in Formula One on a global platform in the best sport in the world.

Q: How are you and Ken dividing the work at the moment?

PW: Basically Ken is the team principal, but primarily he is more on the technical side. The last time he was over here in Europe was for the meeting of the Technical Working Group, but then he flew straight back to Charlotte because there is so much going on at the moment. I am more on the driver/operational side. We both have an overview of the marketing side and, of course, we both have an overview what’s going on in every aspect. For me, Ken is an unusual engineer in Formula One because he does have a very good feel for the business side of the industry and for how F1 works as an entertainment business. Both of us keep reminding each other that we are in the entertainment business – and we should never let any of the little short-term problems that we all face in Formula One interfere with that. It should always be a main focus of what we are doing, particularly in our case of being an American team and building the car in the United States. We have a certain role to play for Formula One in the United States in trying to rekindle enthusiasm for this great sport.