Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a former host of the US Grand Prix. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Teams and sponsors always complained that after the novelty of the first year, it was hard to get corporate guests to go to Indy, and while dedicated fans were willing to travel from all over the USA, you couldn’t exactly make the place the focus of a family holiday. I did live there for a season, so I do know what I’m talking about!

Looking at a map, I can’t see that Austin is going to have much more appeal to corporate guests or the casual race fan than Indy had. Sure, there’s a big catchment area if you take into account other Texas cities, but are there really enough F1 fans in the region to make it work? And are folks who might have been tempted by a Las Vegas or New York weekend going to fly in from all corners of the USA, never mind Europe?

In addition, Indy had a century of open-wheel racing history and a ready-made venue with decades of organizational and marketing expertise.

Indeed the Austin track is something we know nothing about as yet. Bernie says it will be purpose built, and as such will be the first non-street venue created especially to host the US GP.

The company behind the race is Full Throttle Productions, founded in 2005 and responsible for a modest NASCAR Grand National event at Thunder Hill Raceway in Kyle, 20-minutes south of Austin. It’s a 38-acre site, so it’s tempting to assume that it might be redeveloped as the F1 venue, but Bernie may want something a little closer to the city. Wherever it is, it’s going to be a very expensive project, and one assumes it will have to find year round use to be viable.

The boss of Full Throttle is Tavo Hellmund. Born in Mexico and raised in Texas, he raced karts and midgets before heading to Europe to do Formula Ford and F3. He returned to run in stock cars in the States. His father promoted the Mexico City IndyCar races in 1980-81 and had some involvement in F1, and has thus known Bernie for a long time. In that sense it’s a family business for the younger Hellmund.

Time will tell whether Full Throttle’s "Allstate Texas Racefest" is adequate training for running a Grand Prix - something that even Tony George ultimately couldn’t make work...