USF1 technical director Ken Anderson made a last-ditch proposal to the FIA requesting his team be allowed to begin its season in Barcelona. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Anderson: Well, we live in an age of FedEx, DHL, UPS … the logistics side is actually pretty simple. Whether you are traveling … it just took me 20 hours to get back from San Francisco the other day with all the delays. Anyone who travels a lot now is used to it. Whether you are going to Australia from here or England, it’s kind a moot point.

Windsor: If you take away the Spanish Grand Prix and the Monaco Grand Prix, with the logistics we have, we’ll have our cars back in Charlotte sooner than most of the British-based teams will have their trucks back to their factories in England.

Varhsa: The idea of locating in Charlotte, N.C. … so closely associated with NASCAR … not a series known for high-tech cars, engines and so forth. But Ken, you and I talked about this earlier. That’s really a misunderstanding of the situation. There is an awful lot of racing high-tech in this area isn’t there?

Anderson: Absolutely. Racing is a $6 billion industry in North Carolina. And probably within 50 miles of Charlotte, it’s all there. It pretty easy to build a four-valve, twin-cam racing motor, but try to take a pushrod, two-valve with a cast-iron block and get the sort of horsepower they get … there are some brilliant people here and some great equipment. A shaker rig doesn’t know if it has a Cup car on it or a Formula One car on it. A wind tunnel doesn’t know … the benefit of that is that we have more equipment and more talented people in this area than anywhere on the planet.

There are a lot of suppliers to Formula One that are here. McLaren Electronics has a facility in Mooresville. Gunther Steiner, the technical director at Red Bull and Jaguar, we meet at a coffee shop in Davidson. There are a lot more people here than people realize.

Media Question: Gentlemen, who is going to drive your cars?

Windsor: These will be the fun things. We’ve been going through the growth pains for two, three years. Drivers, sponsors, engines … they are all the fun bits of a race team. They are not easy, but when we realized that the technology was here and with the help of the new FIA regulations, that were made for new teams to come into the sport, we therefore could do a team here in the United States and it was going to be a car made in America. The logical thing than from a marketing perspective was than to see if we can have two American drivers. And that is indeed what we intend to do. A lot of people will throw there hands up and say, ‘How can you do that?’ Of course, we don’t have any American drivers in Formula One right now, so by definition, the two people we have in the car in 2010 will be relatively inexperienced without a lot of road dust on them, but at the same time, we are going to stick to that. We are a young team. Nothing wrong with having young drivers growing at the same pace.

The answer is we haven’t made any decision on drivers yet. Your guess is as good as mine, because there is a list out there of American drivers with the right credentials to race in Formula One who have the talent … they’ve proven they have the talent already. It’s a question of finding the two most compatible drivers with what we are setting out to achieve in year one -- and year two probably -- and grow with us. That’s all a great discussion point. All the drivers out there, if one had to take names now … the next generation looks really good. You’ve got Alex Rossi, who obviously won a lot of races in Formula BMW. You’ve got Conor Daly and Josef Newgarden … really three talented young guys. Gabby Chavez is also very good. And if you take a level slightly higher than that, you have Jonathan Summerton, who has won at the international level already in A1GP driving for Team USA … very talented and he’s already raced in Europe. Scott Speed has Formula One experience. We know Scott. He’s a very talented guy. He’s doing very well in NASCAR right now. It would be interesting to know if he is totally comfortable where he is right now. There are NASCAR drivers out there right now who I really think if they wanted to switch to Formula One, we could groom them and help them make that change. We were chatting with Dave Despain the other night about Kyle Busch for example. What a great star he would be. Formula One would welcome anything like that. Danica Patrick is another name that has to be considered for what she has achieved and, again, she’s raced in Europe and she’s done it the hard way.