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.

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.

USF1blog.com had the opportunity to sit down and interview one of the few U.S. drivers that have been offered a test drive from Team USF1 ahead of their inaugural Formula 1 season.  Michael Ramies is the name that everyone else had missed in the storm of questions about the 2010 lineup, and we are proud to bring you an inside look at the path of one USF1 candidate. We feel very strongly that Michael is truly the future face of American’s in International motor sports.

Michael thanks for taking the time today to talk with USF1blog.com.

Jeff: Let’s start from the top, how did you get started in competitive racing?
Michael Ramies: When I was 11, I started at the Jim Russell Karting Center in Sonoma. I did really well right away, in my first class, so my parents got me my own Kart which I drove as a hobby for the next three years. I have to admit that at the time I really wasn’t thinking that I was going to be racing competitively as a career. After that, my dad put me in the Skip Barber two and three day racing school and I did extremely well in that I went into the actual Skip Barber Race series.

J: So now you have progressed past Barber, what do you think the next logical step is for you?
MR: I’m working on a deal right now to start racing in the Pro1000 Racing Series in a Caparo T1000. Everything in the States, doesn’t really translate well to the different racing series over there, so right now it makes sense for me to move across the Atlantic.

(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.

Team USF1 has officially backed the F2000 Championship Series as a Feeder Series into the team, as a push to promote American single-seater talent. (Re-post from f2000championshipseries.com)

—

On behalf of the USF1 Team we would like to congratulate everyone involved in F2000 in the United States.  One of our goals is to take American drivers back into Formula One, and then to produce the next American F1 World Champion – and it is because of series like F2000 that we feel confident that we can do this. We love the concept of the F2000 car:  it has a great 2-litre engine, wings, slicks and “real” suspension;  and we love the road courses featured on the F2000 calendar.  As such, F2000 gives young drivers a tangible opportunity to learn about track-craft, set-up and preparation without the higher costs and neutralizing affects of big-brand, hi-tech spec formulae.  Joel Miller, Patrick Barrett and JR Hildebrand are just three of the stars of tomorrow that F2000 has helped to nurture;  no doubt there will be many more.

The USF1 Team is therefore delighted to announce that it endorses the F2000 championship as one of its official “feeder” series.  For too long the path to F1 for young American drivers has been clouded by a lack of respect for single-seater racing and for those talented drivers who lack the financial wherewithal to take the expensive route to the top.  Jeremy Shaw’s Team USA has done – and will continue to do – a fantastic job of encouraging new talent;  we look forward now to working with both Team USA and F2000 towards the new frontier.

Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor
USF1 Team

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.

YouTube spans multiple platforms

By now you may have heard that Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube, is the major investor in USF1, but what’s it mean for the team? For starters, keep in mind that it’s not YouTube that’s involved, but Chad himself.

Anyone who doubts the power of new media should check out what good ideas are worth – search engine juggernaut Google bought YouTube from Hurley and his partners for $1.65 billion. And the guy is just 33. So while a financial investment will buy a lot of carbon fiber, I believe Hurley’s true contribution is his business mind.

USF1 co-owner Peter Windsor has refused to confirm whether YouTube will be sponsoring his F1 team when it takes to the grid next season.

US F1 will enter F1 in 2010 and preparations for their debut are well underway, including the search for sponsors.  And, according to speculation, one potentional sponsor is YouTube as Windsor and his USF1 co-owner Ken Anderson entertained YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley at the British GP.

“I did see Chad at Silverstone, he was around and it was good to see him there,” Windsor told SPEED TV.  “People have tied him to our team, which is incredibly flattering, and who knows?

“We’ve got plenty of announcements that we’ll be making shortly, and we’ll be announcing the identities of all of our investors and quite a lot of other stuff as well, really exciting stuff.”

“At the moment all I can say is that we’ve just got our heads down doing what is immediately important to us, which is building the team now that we’ve got our entry.”

“But we have got a great investor group and it’s going to take us into the 21st century in a way that you guys have never imagined.”

The last statement has insiders speculating on an exclusive US F1 content delivered exclusively on YouTube.  This would not be surprising considering Windsor’s view of Formula 1 as ‘entertainment first’.

photo credit ©brian dowling