YouTube injects cash into US F1 team YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley has joined the US Formula One team as its primary investor. The boss of Google's online video-sharing empire hopes to see the US F1 team, led by Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor, win in the motorsporting world's Grand Prix tournament in 2010 and beyond. Hurley will pump money into the US …
Q: How do you make a small fortune in Formula One?
A: Start with a large fortune.
Seriously, the wealth of one wealthy individual is not enough to sustain a team. If the resources of Toyota have won them, er, absolutely zilch, in 8 years of racing, not one race, then poor old Chad is going to join the long list of business folk who have found F1 to be a very expensive drain on resources.
I wish him and USF1 well. I give them 4 year max before they disappear, with Chad's fortune slightly dented.
And Bernie still not allowing F1 clips on YouTube.
Not from 2010 - no refuelling from next year, only tyre changes! Maybe they'll tow a fuel bowser.
Sounds like another BAT, great, more teams are welcome, but they'll not win anything for a few years, get fed up (cos septics can't take that) and quit/sell-out.
Pity they're not going to be called "Team America [Fsck yeah]" 'cos then they'd have a ready-made theme song...
> USF1 plans to show-off American talent and tech from
> their home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
>
> However, its cars will use a Cosworth engine, which as
> the engine maker points out on its website "began life in
> a small workshop in London in 1958 when it was founded
> by Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth."
And why is this a problem? Taking the credit for other countries' technology is what made America great.
Rumour has it that USF1 are going to be employing a female F1 driver, so they will get a ton of publicity in the US simply for that, and should they start to win (not very likely) that'll raise its profile in the US.
2010 though, Ferrari, Williams, McLaren etc.. should have sorted the issues out with their cars so a startup like USF1 doesn't really stand much of a chance of winning the title by 2012.
Presumably they'll be using terribly cheap plastics, and the suspension will be so comedically soft it'll look like a kangaroo even on the smoothest of tracks. Unless they poach their engineers from other teams, in which case it'll become a British team, funded from overseas, much like most of the other teams...
The basic inaccuracy of the USF1 press release was the subject of much debate at Vulture Central. The last US F1 team to win a GP, as Mr Larrington points out, was the Penske team in Austria in 1976. The last US F1 team were Beatrice/Haas-Lola in the mid 1980s, although they never won a GP.
What I think USF1 are trying to do by discounting these efforts is to tap into the inherent patriotism of the US public. They have deliberately gone back not to Penske, (US team, British Engine, John Watson as driver, who was from Northern Ireland,) but to All American Racing, (US team, US-commissioned but British-built engine, American driver,) whose sole 1967 GP victory they use as their historical reference point. They refer to this victory as a win in a Grand Prix 'tournament'. This is a misleading term that might suggest to the uninformed that the team had, in fact, won the entire championship that year, rather than just one race. The fact that most Americans know little about F1 means they can use this to suggest that USF1 is the latest instalment in a long and distinguished history for American F1 teams, when in fact their record is less than inspiring.
The reason for this is not obvious, but the enthusiasm that patriotism generates can only be helpful in gaining sponsorship and support. USF1 have already suggested that they will be using new media and methods to gain the finance they will need to run the team, and I suspect that this attempt to paint USF1 as the latest instalment in a long history may be part of this. It would not surprise me, for example, if as well as the YouTube money, they also attempted to personalise the F1 experience by taking smaller, personal sponsorships for the cars and team in much the same way that Jan Lammers with his Racing For Holland Le Mans team. This would fit well with the YouTube sponsorship, too. The YouTube slogan is 'Broadcast Yourself', after all.
What baffles me is why the team chose to go with US teams rather than US drivers, as America does actually have history there, with Phil Hill and Mario Andretti both being world champion drivers.
Maybe that will become part of the media approach once they announce their driver line-up. Expect that to go ballistic, if Danica Patrick indeed joins them and becomes only the third ever female F1 driver.
Matt D
(Sub Ed)
I just looked it up, and there have apparently previously been five female F1 drivers, not two. Of those, only two ever actually qualified for a race, though, so if Danica Patrick managed to qualify in a USF1 car, it would make her the third female driver to actually race in a championship GP.
Inaccuracy, schminaccuracy...
"They have deliberately gone back not to Penske, (US team, British Engine, John Watson as driver, who was from Northern Ireland,) but to All American Racing, (US team, US-commissioned but British-built engine, American driver,)"
The team's name was Anglo American Racing, formed by Dan Gurney in 1966.
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