Peter Windsor, the former co-owner of the failed USF1 project, has said that he would still like to enter Formula One again in the future, despite the collapse of his attempt to get an American-backed team onto the grid for 2010.
USF1, a joint project between Windsor and Ken Anderson, was one of four teams selected to join the grid in the 2010 season. But the team struggled with a number of budgetary and technical issues, and withdrew from the 2010 championship on the eve of the new season.
Although the team vowed to try again in 2011, they closed down shortly after the start of the season, with their assets being sold at auction earlier this year.
The collapse of the project was seen as a huge embarrassment for America, as well as the team's main investor, YouTube boss Chad Hurley. But despite the pathetic saga of USF1 that stretched through the whole of the pre-season, Windsor has insisted that he had always believed the team would have succeeded.
"There was never a moment I didn't think it was going to happen until it didn't happen," he pouted in an interview with GPWeek.
"You learn in life constantly to push and to fight. Within your control, you always do all you can to make it happen. Most of the people I know in motor racing are like that – they never give up until it's over."
He offered a series of excuses as to why USF1 failed while the other new teams, including a Lotus team who did not have their entry officially granted until September.
We were awarded an entry in June, but that was for an FIA championship that did not include any of the big-name teams," Windsor explained, referring to the FIA-FOTA war of last summer.
"It wasn't until late July that the two parties – the FIA and FOTA – actually sat down and spoke with any sort of civility, and it wasn't until mid-August that we actually signed into the single-championship Concorde Agreement.
Until that time, we couldn't exist as a company, we couldn't have a website, we couldn't trade, we couldn't hire people."
He added: "As far as I know, Lotus was already a long way down the track with design work by then – and their design team was a harmonious unit, well-used to working under pressure and familiar with one another.
"It was never going to happen [for USF1] overnight, however; if a well-oiled Mike Gascoyne operation only just made Bahrain, we were always going to need more time to do the same thing around a brand new project in the States."
He added that the recent global financial crisis also hurt the USF1 team's efforts to make it onto the grid.
"When we originally planned our team, there were two or three free spaces on the grid and nobody had made a move to try to fill them. Everybody believed the conventional wisdom that an F1 team must cost €150 million or thereabouts," he rambled.
"We set out to change that – to show that, in the States, you could do a start-up team for much less and that it could grow from there. This was long before the recession, remember. This was in the days when F1 sponsors were falling off trees."
He went on: "As it happened, our approach chimed-in perfectly with the recession that began over the winter of 2008/09."
He added that despite the tragicomic ending for USF1, he would still be interested in pursuing a new entry into the sport in the future.
"Obviously I was very, very sad," he said unhappily, "Equally, I've learnt a lot – and, hopefully, I'm a better person for it.
"I wanted to do an all-new and very creative F1 team, we got an entry, we gave it 100 per cent and we didn't make it. A few people have said a lot of nasty, critical things – but believe me, none of the things they've said have been as tough as the things I've said to myself."
"That's what happens when you try something difficult and new."
He added: "If it was the right package – by which I mean the right group of people and the right situation – yes, certainly [I would try again]."
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