US F1 'humbled' by Formula 1 entry

The American-based team was one of three to be handed unconditional entries to next year's world championship, as the row over the presence of current teams continues.

And although US F1 has been working hard for several years to make it into Formula 1, Windsor admits finally achieving that target has been a strange experience.

"I was thinking how small I feel relative to this massive sport and all the talk going on - the big names and the small names," he said in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live.

"[For] everything this sport has meant to me for the last 50-odd years of my life, finally to see the name of the team which I am lucky to be involved in on the FIA entry list is quite a humbling moment. I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but that is how I feel. I have got a lot of time and history in this sport and this is a very big day for me."

Windsor said that his team would decide soon on drivers - having recently taken a look at some American youngsters.

"We have got a shortlist of drivers," he said. "We already have had the first of our week of evaluation of young Americans, and there are some very good American drivers out there. We will be making a decision about that soon. But before we do anything of course we needed to get officially an entry from the FIA and we now have that. From now on it will be guns blazing."

And although Windsor concedes that US F1 would prefer it for the row between current teams and the FIA to be resolved, he says he cannot waste any time worrying about what happens.

"Our ambition is to first of all prove that we can design and build a car in the United States, rather than Europe," he explained.

"I think in the context of the discussions that we are having right now, we were planning this team three or four years ago - long before budget caps and recession and all this stuff was thought about.

"So we are just coming in to take our place in the sport and where it falls is where it will go. But we hope, like everyone else, there will be one championship and we will be competing in that one championship.

"We are not competing because of what is going on now, but because it has been our long held ambition to be in F1."

When asked if it was important Ferrari remained a part of F1, Windsor said: "Of course it matters. We all love the sport and we all hope and pray that the sport will remain as one championship. From our point of view we have got so much work ahead of us that I cannot really at this point imagine coming up for air and even looking around and seeing what everyone else is doing.

"We will be racing next year, we have just got to get on. We have a massive project and a massive job ahead of us. That is the challenge we face."