Peter's blog entry for Feb 21

>> 02.21.09 

I guess it all began on the morning of Wed, Feb 4, when I awoke in my San Francisco hotel room – box, in reality, featuring a wall-to-wall bed – to find 35 emails on my BlackBerry.

The story had broken. USF1 was on the internet. There were emails from friends and family – but there were also a number of emails from journalists worldwide, all of whom wanted "the full story” and "all the background”. All wanted – expected – an immediate response.

And so arose in me a feeling of nausea. For a couple of years now, Ken Anderson and I had been signing potential associates to NDAs – to non-disclosure agreements – and, as time had gone on, so our confidence in that legal document had risen. Despite the cyberspace traffic between everyone involved in USF1, the press never seemed to grab the story. We seemed to be safe.

Safe? Looking back, I guess the main reason for wanting to keep things quiet was because USF1 from the start was so new, and so different, in concept. Long before the current economic recession, we were thinking "lean, mean and Skunk Works”. We were questioning why the existing F1 teams needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in not winning races; and we were convinced that not only could an F1 could be designed and built in the USA but also that we could base the team in America, too.

We also knew about F1 politics – about the "not invented here” syndrome and the "more money” mantra, as in, "when in doubt, spend more”. During the "boom” times of 2006-07 - funny how just ordinary times suddenly become the "boom” days in the light of a recession! - we knew that we were so far away from mainstream thinking that the eyes of most F1 "experts” would glaze over long before we’d finished delivering our plans.

So for that reason we wanted to keep our profile low. Also, it’s a fair bet in F1 that half-leaked information enables most people to add two and two and get four hundred and ninety-seven. In other words, there was a clear argument for waiting as long as possible before we went public.

When to go public? That was relatively simple: we needed to be accepted by F1’s governing body, the FIA, and we needed to be sufficiently capitalized to be truly solid. Until then, we would lie low.

Well, things changed as time marched forwards. Financial Armageddon came and people started to listen to the FIA when they said "we need drastically to reduce costs”. Suddenly, our approach seemed to be in-tune with that of the economy. Engines became more affordable. The FIA welcomed our business plan. Simultaneously, sponsors began to cut back and then withdraw; Honda pulled out.

Overnight, almost, our plans didn’t look so outlandish after all. We were ready to stage our first, big presentation to potential investors.

Then came the leak. Our appearance in Silicon Valley was but two days away.

Ken and I read the bulk of the stories over breakfast at Starbucks – and, to our surprise, they seemed to be pretty much as we would have written them ourselves. Dieter Rencken, of Autosport.com, grasped our concept in its entirety – as did Jonathan Noble and the boys at F1 Racing. None knew about the infrastructure we had put together at USF1 over the past couple of years, and none knew about our business plan in detail. All of them, however – well, nearly all of them – seemed to love the idea of a recession-busting new F1 team from the US of A.

With some tailwind, therefore, we set about preparing for Friday night. Sound system. Catering. Projector. Security – for there would be some heavy-hitters present. Tom Ramies, F1 enthusiast and engineer to the stars, and his 18-year old son, Mike, who is turning heads in Barber races, plugged the gaps and then some. Emmet Keefe and Maurice Martin, our two directors from LA, flew in with more additions to the guest list.

…Five, four, three, two, one…..and I was on. Never had I been more nervous.

Ninety minutes later – ninety minutes of Ken Anderson at his best, detailing the technology infrastructure he had built over 20 years in American motor sport – we were done. This was USF1. This was how America could ignite its entrepreneurial flame in the recession and take a place on the F1 global platform. We weren’t bringing F1 to the US: we were taking the US to F1.

Within seconds, a diminutive dynamo of a man embraced me and whispered in my ear: "Fantastic! I’m in. You’ve got your first investor!”

He turned out to be Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, one of the four best creative ad agencies in the world – and with the Clios in the reception area to prove it. An F1 fan from the days his San Francisco ad agency handled the HP F1 account for Williams, Rich had initially been skeptical: "An F1 team now? With the economy like this and Honda pulling out? Boy, you guys like a challenge…”

Then he got it. Then he understood the brilliance of Bernie Ecclestone’s F1 ecomony, the strong, rule-changing reaction of the FIA – and the simplicity with which a Skunk Works F1 team could be assembled in the US.

We were truly on our way. For Ken and me, this was maybe the best moment of our working lives to date – and other investors would follow within days.

Now, a short month later, we have exceeded our investment targets and have the capital we need. The support and enthusiasm for USF1 has been nothing short of overwhelming. As clichéd as it is, the NASA-speak is irresistible: we have lift-off!

The interesting thing is that there is no template, no guide book, of how to do an F1 team from zero in the 21st century – particularly when the team in question is not owned and dominated by a large car company or by one extremely wealthy individual whose background is in or energy drinks or whisky or some other non-racing activity.

From the thousands of emails we have received over the past couple of weeks it’s clear that most people imagine that we will have a car on the ground within a few months and that we will be testing from mid-09 onwards.

The truth, of course, is that our 2010 car will first turn a wheel early in the New Year. Although we will sign an engine supply deal in the next few months, that supply deal will not begin until Jan 1, 2010, which means no testing in 09 and a conventional time frame in which to design and build the car. In the next few months our engineers will work from rented premises, finalizing drawings and detailed production plans, and in mid-09 we will move into our new headquarters.

Needless to say, the days since that presentation have passed in a blur. Meetings with our investors. Interviews. Hundreds of well-wishing emails to which to reply. Discussions with potential drivers. Etc, etc.

And, in between, for perhaps only a few minutes or so, a chance to see some of America – and to remind ourselves of what USF1 is ultimately all about.

From San Francisco we drove south on Route One to Los Angeles. The sea otters said hi in Monterey as I paid homage to John Steinbeck in Cannery Row. I re-traced James Dean’s last drive. And, in LA, I headed straight for MacArthur Park – partly because of the Jimmy Webb song immortalized by Richard Harris, partly because I had been hearing over the years that the place was now in disrepair.

To my surprise, the park glowed in a golden light as I approached the MacArthur Memorial. And there he stood, shoulders back, chin forward. It was in 1955 that the General attended a dedication here at the park. In the reflecting pool – murky and unkempt – could be seen the outlines of the islands he seized between 1942-45. Seized from the Japanese, yes – but then he gave everything back to that nation in the years that would follow after the war. To the Japanese – much more than to his own nation, it seems – Douglas MacArthur is still a hero. The globalization of which so many F1 people now speak? Perhaps it all began with Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur and Sir Winston Spencer Churchill.

All the time, though, USF1 is at the back of your mind. Ken and I spent time later that day with Dan, Evi, Justin and Alex Gurney – with the family who in their own, gracious way represent the people of inspiration without whom USF1 would not be happening. We talked fighter pilots and NASA, toe-in and camber-change. Dan spoke of Jim Clark and of racing back then in the 1960s; and then, much later, Ken and I left, and drove back to LAX, vowing always to remember our roots.

Next morning, awaiting a flight back to Charltotte, where we would begin the first real days in the life of USF1, we came across an American flag and a "flight path” of names that will live for ever more: Charles Lindbergh; Amelia Earhart; and there – by the diagram of a cockpit of a P-51 Mustang, John K Northrop – "Pioneer Aircraft Designer” – together with JH "Dutch” Kindelberger, whose North American company was located only a few blocks away, and whose firebrand charge, Harrison "Stormy” Storms, did so much for the Apollo space program.

Without these people, we knew - and the companies they spawned -there would be little of the US technology that fuels so much of the F1 industry today. Without America’s aviation and aerospace industry, we reflected, there would be no USF1.

The US Air Airbus A321 screamed off over the Pacific and banked right towards the mainland. Our great adventure was starting.