USF1 -- F1's All-American Challenger

[Roger the knife]

Regarding all the equipment required to set up, CNC's etc, a lot of this stuff is provided on a free-loan basis by the manufacturers, especially Haas machines, in return for good publicity , sort of sponsorship, same for a lot of the consumables, so the main initial outlay was for the building lease and re-modelling the interior.

Really it all seems to come down to a complete lack of technical organisation

[Fil]

This one's for you WB, i get that Lopez wants 830 kUSD back, but can you translate the rest?

http://www.motorsport-total.com/f1/news ... 30208.html

here u go.. link
interesting that violation of concorde is mentioned for the first time. and not in a future tense, but that it has already happened..

and blame is being put on Anderson solely.. we may yet need to apologise to Windsor - his only fault may have been trusting Anderson.

[meves]

Does anyone know when the FIA will be making an announcement? I thought d-day was yesterday?

[xpensive]

Does anyone know when the FIA will be making an announcement? I thought d-day was yesterday?

I think they have to wait for the FIA World Council to meet next week, they can't do anything before that it seems.

@ fil; This could turn ugly if they have a case, but why would you pay 830k without at least an embryo of a car?

[meves]

Cheers Xpensive, I'll save my excitement for then!

[segedunum]

here u go.. link......and blame is being put on Anderson solely.. we may yet need to apologise to Windsor - his only fault may have been trusting Anderson.

Thanks for the translation link.

I don't think it was any secret that Anderson was always the main culprit. He had a proven track record of failed projects where money had been sunk and not recovered. However, Windsor isn't off the hook because he'd have to be incredibly stupid not to have had some inkling about the lack of progress they were making, and he acted like a kid in a toy shop about what they were going to do such as signing US drivers and Kyle Busch(!) - which promptly never materialised. The commercial side was his responsibility. You can't blame Anderson for that and stupidity is no excuse.

I think many of us, me included, said many pages back that any money sunk into that team would simply disappear. So it has. Lopez's backers are going to want to know where that has gone. The only prediction left to come true is for, certainly Ken Anderson, and possibly Windsor to mysteriously 'disappear'. I await the "We can't find Ken Anderson" and "Where's Ken?" articles to follow in due course. That would make a nice new Tailender video as well.

[xpensive]

This gets better all the time, here's Auto Motor und Sport, today;

http://blog.auto-motor-und-sport.de/sch ... -fur-usf1/

Ex-Formel 1-Pilot Stefan Johansson, ein Kenner der US-Rennszene, hatte mir schon im August letzten Jahres erzählt: “Vergiss den Anderson. Der ist ein Traumtänzer. Redet viel, nichts dahinter. Nur leider merken das viele Leute zu spät.” Man hätte auf den Schweden hören sollen.

Ex-Formula 1 driver Stefan Johansson, an expert on the U.S. racing scene, had told me in August last year, says: "Forget Anderson. He is a dreamer. Talks a lot, nothing behind it. Unfortunately, many people notice it too late. "

Stefan should know, as they were working together at Ligier, Onyx and later at the Bettenhausen CART-team.

[Pup]

Word is that they are officially kaput.

http://translate.google.de/translate?u= ... =&ie=UTF-8

[Tim.Wright]

If the equipment you listed cost $100m, I'll eat the internet. I doubt if there's $10m worth of equipment in their shop, probably more like $5m, and half of that was probably leased.

Lotus' budget is £55m for the year, including startup costs.

You might want to start eating. Remember I said puchase AND commissioning. When you add the labour costs of getting all of this stuff running you will break $100m easily. I worked for a company who spend well over $20m setting up a composite manufacturing facility only. The big killer - labour wages. oh and the austoclaves.

Though this becomes a moot point if indeed a lot of this gear is sponsored.

Tim

[Pup]

Hmm. So $80m difference/60 employees=$1.33m per. No wonder they had trouble meeting payroll.

[segedunum]

Word is that they are officially kaput. http://translate.google.de/translate?u= ... =&ie=UTF-8

A ha, and there we have it, in a somewhat broken translation, but the meaning is fairly clear:

"Exclusively from Charlotte: U.S. F1 can not pay salaries more and shall cease to operate - Staff not informed by Ken Anderson"......"The unpleasant task of informing the employees, not incidentally, Anderson took over himself, but production manager Dave Skog - the very last act too often the criticism of team boss had earlier fled."

Now that the whole thing has collapsed it's the "Where's Ken?" show.

[bill shoe]

It's not clear how money could have been USF1's fundamental problem. Entire runs of modern carbon-tub formula cars get made for amounts that are apparently less than the USF1 budget. And they get made on time, and the cars run. Examples are Formula Atlantic, Formula 2, Formula BMW, Formula Mazda.

Any reasonable team start-up plan must conclude with the result of having a complete, legal, running car. This means that if you only have enough budget to outsource the monocoque instead of building it yourself then that's what you do. You don't buy a bunch of expensive equipment and pay people to operate it if that leaves you will inadequate funding to get to the first race of the year. You also don't budget on the hope that additional funding will materialize soon.

You don't have to build a rocketship car that blows away McLaren, just put together a basic car that runs and passes tech. The boxy Lotus car appears to be a great example.

I don't know the particular details of what went wrong when, which partner promised what to whom, or how much money they actually spent. However, I'm unable to imagine a plausible scenario where USF1 was reasonably well managed and they ended up with the current result.

[timbo]

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/81819
officially dead?

[segedunum]

"It is understood that neither Anderson nor Windsor were present at the factory while the announcement was made, and neither was available for comment about the latest situation."

Absolutely disgraceful. Yep, I think they've done a bunk.

[exepm]

CAMPOS META will change name to Hispania Racing (team lunch this thursday)

and Pechito López will be the reserve pilot.

and thank you for nothing USF1

http://www.elmundodeportivo.es/web/gen/ ... 93601.html