F1 2010's lost teams: US F1

Formula 1's laboured endeavours to break into the American market properly had been well-documented throughout its history. In contemporary F1, having now had eight races at the purpose-built Circuit of the Americas, with an American team (Haas) and having taken on American owners (Liberty) in 2017, the tide is beginning to turn - but the stranglehold that IndyCar and NASCAR has in the States is still tough to break.

But until Gene Haas brought his eponymous outfit into F1, the last American team to participate in F1 did so 30 years prior to that. The unrelated Carl Haas' outfit, running a Lola-badged chassis penned by Neil Oatley and Ross Brawn, entered with backing from Beatrice Foods and lasted for a season and a bit before its funding from the food processing concern expired.

The deadlock of American manufacturers entering F1 - having enjoyed a glut in the '60s and '70s with Eagle, Penske and, erm, Scarab - looked to have been broken sooner amid F1's new-team tender process.

PLUS: The front-engined "s*** beetle" that was born obsolete

Sensing an opportunity to increase F1's exposure in America, the FIA admitted the US F1 team to the 2010 grid in its overtures to hand the Star-Spangled Banner its first exposure on the constructors' list for nearly quarter of a century.

• F1 2010's lost teams
• Prodrive
• Epsilon Euskadi
• Lola
• Campos Meta 1

Set up by engineer Ken Anderson - a veteran of IndyCar, having headed up the design of the G-Force car that took to the IRL's cast of oval circuits - and ex-Williams team manager Peter Windsor, the US F1 project made its home in Charlotte, North Carolina from facilities formerly owned by the Joe Gibbs Racing NASCAR team. But although the US F1 project only took to the entry list in 2009, Anderson and Windsor had been working on getting to F1 since the mid-2000s.

"I had been planning the team for years and working towards that," Anderson explains. "I mean, even to the point of building a full-scale rolling road windtunnel (Windshear, funded by the Haas CNC NASCAR team), which was sort of parallel with things I was doing [at the team].

"But the actual team, the actual start-up goes back to 2005 or 2006, planting the seeds and stuff like that. Peter Windsor (pictured below, right, with Anderson) and I have been friends since I worked with Williams in 1985, so we've done a lot of things together and he was a big help getting things together.

"Max [Mosley] and Bernie [Ecclestone] were really helpful too. And it is a long time ago, 2008, when we kicked everything off, got sponsorship lined up, got investors lined up and met with Nick Craw, the American delegate of the FIA."

"We showed him all our budget, how we're going to do [F1] and all that. He was thrilled, and sent it on to Max. Next morning, we had a letter from Max that said 'welcome to Formula 1, you're accepted'. Max had been trying to get like a sensible budget that a team could work to, and basically took ours and that's what sort of became the basis of the Resource Restriction Agreement. Everything was good. The very next day, Honda pulled out."

"Ken had some had a couple of interesting ideas. One was he decided he was going to have a transverse gearbox in the car because, for some reason, he was adamant that that was the way to go" Karun Chandhok

US F1 had been in talks with multiple engine manufacturers as far back as 2008, but with the mass exodus following the global financial crisis, it severely restricted the team's options. Anderson asserts that, with the United States posing as some of the manufacturers' biggest markets, he was offered lucrative engine deals to help increase their pull on the other side of the Atlantic.

"We had major sponsorship lined up," Anderson says. "We were talking to three different engine manufacturers because obviously the United States was their biggest market - we were actually talking to them about free engines plus money to us. I'll tell you who did: Ferrari. Luca di Montezemolo called me from Bernie's office, wanting to get on board."

In addition, the team looked to have some solid investment from the US all willing to make the project happen. The most high-profile of those was YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley who, along with partner Steve Chen, sold the platform to Google for nearly $2bn. Running a budget-capped F1 team, then, presumably looked like back-of-the-sofa money to the people on board.

Although the team explored options with other manufacturers, US F1 eventually deferred to the FIA's wishes and collected a deal for Cosworth engines. Nonetheless, Anderson says that the eventual decision to take the 'neutral' engine had "undermined" the team's previous plans, having wanted to use US F1 as a platform to help an existing manufacturer expand its presence in America. It was back to the drawing board in that regard.

The team had the plush Windshear windtunnel available to it, along with a full vehicle dynamics facility to build up its engineering program. At the time, Anderson and Windsor were in talks with drivers, including GP2 racer Karun Chandhok, who eventually joined HRT for its eventual stab at F1. Bernie Ecclestone, who had been assisting Chandhok with his endeavours to make the F1 grid, suggested that he flew over to the US to investigate the facilities and see whether the team could potentially offer him a drive for 2010.

"In early November," Chandhok recalls, "I went to Charlotte, and I spent three days there with Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson looking at that whole US F1 thing. I wanted to see for myself if this was something; I'd met with Peter several times in London and we'd spoken [about it], Peter was a mate for many years. And I thought, 'well, if this is serious, I need to go there and look into it.

"I spoke with Bernie and he actually said, 'you know what, to be honest, I could do with somebody that I know and trust as a set of eyes and ears to actually go there and see for myself.' So, I spent three days there and I called Bernie basically every day to sort of fill in and update him on what I've seen."

The team had a car - dubbed the 'US F1 Type 1' designed and in the works. Anderson says that the first chassis was completed "as of Christmas 2009".

"You know," Anderson says, "we were machining all the parts and [had] gearboxes being done and they actually came over and when they measured the car for the wiring loom we were ahead of everybody else."

Those gearboxes were something of an anomaly in the Type 1. Although Xtrac were producing gearboxes for the Cosworth engine, US F1 instead opted for its own layout - going against the grain to run a transverse layout. There were other peculiarities too with the design of the car, featuring coil-over-shock dampers instead of the torsion bar arrangement used commonly in contemporary F1.

"Ken had some had a couple of interesting ideas," Chandhok says. "There were a couple of things he said to me which took me aback a little bit. One was he decided he was going to have a transverse gearbox in the car because, for some reason, he was adamant that that was the way to go and he had this whole plan for it.

"And I'll never forget this, they had a drawing on the wall of the suspension. I looked at it and I thought 'that's a coil-over-spring, damper set-up like we had in F3". And he says, 'yep, this is absolutely what we need to do, we've got to do is have more travel in the suspension, and we're going to have a coil-over-spring damper system'. By then I'd tested with Red Bull so I did have a bit of F1 experience - but I didn't say anything!"

"The other thing he said, I remember, was going to 2010 was the first season where we were going back to no refuelling. And he had this whole thought that because the car was going to now start with 160 kilos of fuel, it's going to put a huge amount of emphasis on mechanical grip rather than aerodynamic because they've got to find a way for the weights to be managed.

"I remember speaking to Ken and him saying to me, 'really sorry we haven't got back to you, but the engine's kind of the last thing we need to worry about'" Mark Gallagher

"He had this whole theory about how it's going to make aero less important and make the mechanical bit more important - it was all sort of tied into his suspension plan. And I listened to all of it and I thought 'I'm struggling to believe this!'"

Sure, the Type 1 had its quirks, but the team at least had something being produced in the facilities. The monocoque was built, and US F1 launched videos on its YouTube channel - arguably, ahead of its time in that facet - of the team building and crash testing a nosecone. Media attention was enough at the team for Anderson and Windsor to make appearances on American TV to share their entry plans and build a following as the squad embarked on its journey towards Formula 1.

But behind the façade, the facilities in Charlotte weren't operating at full capacity. Reports of an empty factory have been confirmed by various external figures during the exploration of the prospective 2010 entries, which Chandhok also attested to during his visit to the team.

"I didn't walk around the factory seeing a hive of activity," he says. "It didn't look like there was dozens of people, I went to the design office and it was just Ken's son in there, and a couple of other people who have come from actually from Honda in Brackley. They'd moved with baggage - family, kids, the whole lot - to join US F1.

"Peter and Ken took me to the Windshear windtunnel with them, we went to see the seven-post rig that they were going to use and they had all these plans of how they were going to logistically operate between the US and Europe. But fundamentally, I didn't come away from that thinking that they were going to be ready in time. It was difficult because Peter's a friend, but it just didn't look like there was enough going on there."

As stories began to emerge from the US F1 camp and suggestions that, indeed, the team didn't look like it was going to be ready, Anderson says that the investors who had aligned themselves with the team began to get "cold feet". With a team on the precipice of not having enough time to make it onto the grid, the sponsors slowly began to trickle away - leaving Anderson and Windsor with a bit of a hole to fill on the finance front.

Some of those concerns were partially alleviated with the signing of ex-GP2 racer Jose Maria Lopez (above), who came with the support of the Argentine government. The team was also "in the process" of securing former Honda and Super Aguri test driver James Rossiter for the other seat, opting for an all-rookie line-up. But again, as finances started to dwindle and doubts around US F1's continued participation became more serious, Lopez began to get wandering eyes and was instead hoping to bring his sponsorship package over to the Campos team - which was also in trouble.

Although Lopez was signed in January of 2010, US F1's suppliers were also beginning to have doubts. Cosworth, now headed up by Mark Gallagher (below) after Lola's F1 bid was turned down, was in dialogue with the teams to ensure that it could cater to all of its customers - except US F1, which proved incredibly difficult to get any vital information out of. One conversation, Gallagher recalls, was enough for him to think that US F1's entry was due to hit the wall sooner or later.

"US F1 had actually been making payments to us and we were really cracking on to produce engines for them," he says. "But the weird thing is we just couldn't get any information out of them. So we were asking them 'what's your sidepod design? What's your air intake design?' You've obviously got to get the fuel system right, and the gearbox and all the installation. We just weren't getting anything back.

"On the flip side, we were having meetings with Williams, we were having meetings with Virgin and with Team Lotus and with Campos, and their engineers were sharing their designs. I mean, you can imagine with Williams, it was a meeting every week with them on engine installations and stuff, so the US F1 thing was really strange.

"Anyway, we got to December, maybe early January 2010. But it become very clear that there was something not right at US F1. I remember speaking to Ken and him saying to me, 'really sorry we haven't got back to you, but the engine's kind of the last thing we need to worry about.'

"I said, 'but it's an integral part. I mean, chassis includes the engine. So you need all of those elements and we really want to get the engines delivered.'

"And, and I'll always remember his words, he said, 'well, once we have the car finished, we'll just drop the engine in.' And I thought, 'this is like it was a Duracell battery, we're going to build a car, drop the old Cossie in the back of it and off we go!'"

"We were in a position to carry on and come later in the year, or the next year. If it would have been Max, we could have worked something out" Ken Anderson

"I think that was a moment when I realised US F1 had gone from being on the 'critical' list for us to it's just not going to happen."

And Gallagher and Cosworth were right. There was radio silence from the team as the other new teams belatedly began to prepare and test their cars, and it became all too apparent that F1's dream to bring an American team into the mix simply wasn't going to take effect for 2010. By March, US F1 had rescinded its entry and the project collapsed weeks later. Anderson says that if the FIA had retained its faith in the team, it could have joined up later in the season.

"Once you realise you've got a $20 million shortfall you go try to find it," Anderson explains, "and I did. The thing is, we were in a position to carry on and come in later in the year, or the next year. If it would have been Max we could have worked something out, but Jean Todt took over Max's position in October."

Another team, Stefan Grand Prix, attempted to purchase US F1's entry mere weeks before the 2010 season began, having apparently got an entry together. The Stefan team also attempted to merge the Campos Meta 1 entry which had hit trouble, but despite the financial tide and circling vultures, the Spanish entry made it to the grid in Bahrain at very short notice...