What's in a name? More specifically, what's in the name "world championship". Clearly, the idea of something being a global tussle is used and abused in countless different settings, none more so than baseball's "World Series", on the subject of which Eddie Izzard once said to a Yankee-filled audience: "You play baseball, the World Series. And you've won every year, America's won every year in that. Well done America." But Formula One's world championship, while admittedly much more global than American Rounders, has a nagging gap in it's worldwide portfolio. A gap that, coincidentally, is precisely the size and shape of the United States of America.
Formula One and America have always been somewhat awkward bedfellows. Throughout the 1980s, the sport ventured to a litany of banal street tracks set up in any old part of the country in an effort to appeal to the fans, and then in the 2000s, a full-blown attempt to trample it's size nines right into the heartland of American motor racing ended in laughable failure when the Indy experiment petered out in 2007 on the back of the 2005 US Grand Prix debacle.
Since then, F1 has largely ignored America as an entity, with the 2009 season even managing to pass off without a single North American round. We occasionally hear Bernie wittering on about bringing a grand prix to the streets of Manhattan and various other hair-brained schemes. But realistically, F1 is once again left staring in bewildered confusion at the USA, wondering quite how to crowbar their way in.
It seemed like the sport was going to be gifted a fairly straightforward "in" card to play this season, with the USF1 team coming onboard promising all-American racing fun and the moon on a stick. But, while Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor proved to be very adept at releasing meaningless press statements, the team's preparations and ambition turned out to be as hollow as a particularly thin Kinder Surprise. Only without the lovely treat in the centre.
Much of the American team's struggle could and should be placed squarely at the door of Messers Anderson and Windsor, who seemed very much to act the merry pair of fools over the organisation, planning and funding of the team, and have borne the brunt of the anger and laughter directed towards the sunken hopes of American motorsport. But, given that the main issue seemed to be a chronic lack of funding, all it really serves to underline is the complete lack of interest the majority of the USA has in Formula 1.
If a racing team, promising to champion American ideals in a global sport, can't find a few sponsors, investors or drivers interested enough in taking part across one of the world's biggest (if slightly stumbling) economies, then clearly something has gone seriously wrong with the USA/F1 relationship. Aside from Chad Hurley, the jobbing founder of YouTube, the team seemed to dredge up virtually no investment at all. They were renting their HQ, they were forced to seek out middling Argentine touring car drivers and failed Honda testers for drivers, and all in all seemed to struggle to get noticed in the American media until it was too late.
Windsor himself, who started the USF1 project seemingly fully intending to run the cream of America's vast driver base in F1, realised his mistake afterwards. "No Americans have licenses to race in Formula One at the moment, sadly, because all the money in America the last 10 years has been in Nascar," he whined last year, "Any good American race driver like Danica [Patrick] now, for example, goes to Nascar because that’s where the future is, that’s where the money is."
Patrick is a perfect example of the low regard F1 is considered with. She is, like it or not, the hottest name in American open wheel racing right now, with only possibly Helio Castroneves, who is more famous for a successful appearance on an American reality TV dance competition than he is for his trio of Indy 500 wins, possibly coming close. As coups for American international interests went, she would probably have been up there with Víctores taking Nicaragua.
But, while she would have been the holy grail for both USF1 and Formula One as a whole in pursuing the Yankee dollar, Patrick instead opted to service her IndyCar paycheque with a drive in a Nascar feeder series. Not even the top level of Nascar, but the sort-of Nascar equivalent of GP2. That's how high up on her priorities Formula One was.
Of course, there probably were other reasons behind that decision. Money was probably one, the acceptance that although she is a handy oval racer, she tends to be a bit cack on 'proper' race tracks may well have been another. But still, it was the first statement from America's established big names that they were in no way interested with helping to promote themselves in F1. Approaches for other top Indycar and Nascar drivers were similarly rebuffed, and with no top brand names to entice top brand sponsors onboard, soon enough the budget issues meant that the team switched their attention from big names to drivers with wallets who weren't afraid to use them. For all the good that did them.
Now, of course, with the USF1 dream dead and buried, for 2010 at least, what this whole folly has served to highlight is that the sport remains as distant as ever from the holy grail of cracking America. In terms of middling pop music, F1 right now is far more Robbie Williams than The Beatles.
So while USF1's loss may not particularly affect the 2010 grid in any significant way, the failure of the grand plan behind the team will likely ensure that F1's world championship remains incomplete for a while yet.
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