In the closing days of the US F1 team’s demise, Ken Anderson made a last-ditch proposal to the FIA requesting his team be allowed to begin its season at Barcelona, site of this weekend’s fifth round of the Formula One championship.
But the FIA decided the wheels had come off US F1’s effort to build a car and declared the grid position open for potential new entrants in 2011. Instead of racing in Spain, US F1 has fired all its employes and begun accounting for $3.5 million in debt. Last month, two transporters acquired from Brawn GP were seized for non-payment and put up for auction on eBay.
What went wrong in the US F1 shops in Huntersville, N.C.? … Details
Two open-top supercars linked to New Zealand’s famous Formula One race mates Bruce McLaren and Denny Hulme have made purely coincidental first public appearances – one in New Zealand and the other at a glitzy ceremony in Europe.
The launches also paid tribute to two surviving names from the same F1 era – Chris Amon, the third member of the Kiwi triumvirate, and Britain’s Sir Stirling Moss.
Amon drove the orange-and-black Hulme CanAm roadster on the Taupo racetrack 24 hours ago, during a break in the A1GP schedule.
Earlier, on the other side of the world, Moss was on hand at a special presentation of a car carrying his name – the Mercedes-Benz SLR Stirling Moss, the final model to come from the Benz partnership with F1’s Team McLaren.
Team McLaren began in 1963 as Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Ltd. McLaren himself was contracted to the British Cooper F1 team at the time and continued to drive for it until 1965, when he entered his own F1 team with Amon as co-driver