The machine shop at US F1 had machines, but produced no Formula One cars. (Photo: RacinToday)
In the closing days of the US F1 team’s demise, Ken Anderson made a last-ditch proposal to the FIA requesting his team be allowed to begin its season at Barcelona, site of this weekend’s fifth round of the Formula One championship.
But the FIA decided the wheels had come off US F1’s effort to build a car and declared the grid position open for potential new entrants in 2011. Instead of racing in Spain, US F1 has fired all its employees and begun accounting for $3.5 million in debt. Last month, two transporters acquired from Brawn GP were seized for non-payment and put up for auction on eBay.
What went wrong in the US F1 shops in Huntersville, N.C.?
In the weeks since the team shut its doors, employees have come forward to talk about the failure to produce a car for the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix – or make enough progress to convince the FIA to keep US F1’s grid spot open. It all came down, said team members, because founder Anderson couldn’t work with the team he created.
“Ken Anderson followed through on 50 percent of the promise of US F1,” said Parris Mullins, who negotiated bids to purchase chassis or create mergers in the 11th hour of the team’s crisis in an attempt to put it on the grid at Bahrain. “Ken assembled a small, excellent team. But he didn’t allow them to execute.”
It was a theme expressed repeatedly by members of the US F1 team in interviews. Anderson’s “need for absolute design control and his lack of understanding was the singular reason for US F1’s demise,” said Frank Dushan Hanisko, one of the team’s experienced F1 veterans.
Former Ferrari salesman Mullins, a very well-connected 27-year-old from Silicon Valley, had initially introduced his friend Chad Hurley to Anderson, which resulted in a $15 million investment in US F1 by Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube. When Mullins moved to Charlotte to assist in business development, he found a reasonably stellar cast that eventually included Steve Brown, the former R&D officer for Brawn GP, Hanisko, formerly the integration engineer for Renault F1 Team and Kevin Bialas, a veteran racer hired from Gulfstream Aerospace who directed the composite shop.
But by mid-January and 60 days before the first Grand Prix in Bahrain, Bialas had only 15 of the design patterns he needed to build what he estimated to be 350 to 500 parts necessary to construct an F1 car.
