(Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images)
Welcome back fellow race fans to a special Fourth of July edition of the Slipstream.
To those of you who inquired about my absence from the site I appreciate the concern and now that things have been squared away, the Slipstream is back and ready to carry all motor sports fans through the summer sizzle to the fall finales.
This week in the spirit of American independence I will profile the efforts and legitimacy of the USF1 project.
After two months of pure unfiltered Schadenfreude, the Forumla One world seems to have got it's groove back, or at least that is how things appear to be. The FOTA war has been averted just as the GPWC war was averted earlier this decade. The same players, plus Ferrari this time, fighting it out with mad Max and the FIA for some say in the future of F1.
That is for another article however.
Soon to be World Champion, Jenson Button seems to have his hands full with a Red Bull team that seems determined not to give up just yet. Although they have the fight to press on, the numbers are not in their favor. I commend the team formerly known as Jaguar/Stewart GP for their zeal, but this year will belong to Brawn and I doubt anyone of us in this community saw that coming. Yes, there was early season hype, but this is Schumacher-esque domination, not the wide open crap shoot this column predicted.
Announced in the middle of the worst economic crisis to hit since the end of World War II, the US F1 team was met with heavy criticism, and a few laughs from this writer. While admirable in approach, after the Honda with drawl and threatened pull out of several more teams, a new team under the red white and blue seemed like the last thing on anybody's mind.
The last size able effort to give the United States any kind of representation on the grid was the botched Red Bull Driver Search.
Heck, I remember those snazzy commercials claiming that Red Bull will find the next American world champion. That program gave Americans a driver in Scott Speed, and to be honest I was proud to see the Stars and Stripes back on the F1 grid. A season and a half later, along with physical altercations with team boss Gerhard Berger, Speed was out of Toro Rosso and into the hootin and hollering field of US oval track racing.
Fast forward a few seasons, and one recession later, and we have the snazzy looking logo of USF1, or USGPE pasted over the SPEED channel, and a press conference justifying rumors made about the team only days before.
This project is real, but is it legitimate?
In regards to logistics this team is far behind the curve ball. Based in Charlotte, North Carolina but with the main center of operations in the UK, this team has good intentions but will be hard pressed to gain any kind of synergy or momentum for quite some time. Will the team test in the United States? Information around these sort of details was sparse to come by, which unto itself is a little troubling. If this team is to become the de facto national team, it must have the infrastructure capable enough to take the fight to the teams it is trying to fight against.
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