Ken Anderson (Left) and former Williams team manager Peter Windsor (Right) founded USF1 and had hoped to make the 2010 Formula One Grid. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Windsor on the effects of the recession: If we were in a boon period right now and money was falling out of the sky, and there was a lineup of teams wanting to do Formula One and lots of trillionaires out there being enticed by the glamour of Formula One, it would be very difficult for guys like Ken and me to put our hands up and say we can do a team efficiently, we can do it in America, we can do it very differently than everybody else, we’d just get laughed out of the ballpark because that’s not the way you do a Formula One team. But the fact that we are in the recession, and don’t forget we started this team long before the recession we ever heard of … the fact that we are in a recession means people actually listen to us now and take us seriously because it all adds up … forget the $48 million bond days, forget the $100 million budgets, forget the $30 million retainers for drivers. Over the next three or four years, things are going to change dramatically in Formula One and that’s our period.

Varsha: How accessible will you be to the media and to the fans?

Windsor: Something I’ve learned over the last year and half here in Charlotte is just how good a job NASCAR teams do for the fans and we are in the entertainment business. We’ve been reminding each other of that from day one. We want this to be entertainment. We want this to be a TV-led Formula One team if you’d like. And we are going to be that by definition, being so close to SPEED here and we’re also going to have our own television production facility inside of our headquarters. So, we are going to make this very fan friendly, not only here in the states, but globally. We are going to design the fan route. Fans are going to be welcome to come to our headquarters. There will be a tour they can. They can look at the car being designed and built. They can touch and feel a Formula One team for the first time and it will be a lovely experience to come here. We’ll have a state-of-the-art facility that will be as good as anything you see in Europe. It won’t be McLaren. It won’t be Ferrari because obviously we don’t have the history, but we’ll do it our way that’s compatible with being here in the United States. If you look at guys like Michael Waltrip, they way they operate their team, that is a case study on how to make motor sports (fan friendly). The way Formula One teams present themselves in America has always been very difficult for the fans to grasp what Formula One is all about. It is very technical. There is lots of money. But nobody ever talks about it and you can’t see the technology and then they go racing and maybe five cars race or maybe 26 cars race, then they all disappear again. Obviously, we have an opportunity here to sell Formula One to our fan base and we have a lot of Formula One fans here.