Thread: Where it started - Toasters and USF1

Great story in Pit Lane Magazine about the USF1 animated parodies . . .

USF1 – My Part In Their Downfall PitlaneMagazine

USF1 – My part in their downfall! Nick Daman

I’m sure the British readers amongst you will realise, that the title of this article paraphrases Spike Milligan’s autobiographical tale of his exploits in WW2 – “Hitler my part in his downfall”. The premise of which, hidden in the humour, was that as a member of the British army his actions had a small effect on the removal of the German dictator. Given that USF1 have openly said that the negative reaction of the press, especially the European press was responsible in part for their non-appearance on the grid, I suppose I should, as a member of the European F1 press corps, accept my responsibilities!

However as the inventor of the “famous” USF1 toaster, perhaps I am culpable.

Let me first say that from the outset I was all in favour of USF1. Peter Windsor is a friend of mine and we worked together on Sky’s F1 digital + service in the early part of the last decade. His vision, whilst optimistic seemed fine, and obviously good enough to convince the FIA that they had all the necessary ingredients to show up with 2 star spangled cars at the first race of 2010.

For those of you who don’t know me, one of my current roles is as “F1 Expert” on Midweek Motorsport, the weekly motorsport magazine show that is broadcast on Radio Le Mans (radiolemans.com) every Wednesday (and naturally podcasted as well!). The demographic for this show is interesting as having grown out of endurance racing it has a very large listenership in the US, and these guys were excited about the prospect of “their own” team, however things started going awry very quickly.

The first thing that seemed strange was the ridiculous amounts of press releases being issued by the team, covering everything from fanciful potential drivers – Kyle Busch for example – to milestones in their entry process –“USF1 pay fee to FIA” was one classic, but none of these releases detailed the things a team need to do to build a car. The PR was particularly silly in relation to drivers. They insisted they would be an all American team when it was obvious to all, that US drivers fell into two groups. The eminently qualified who would never drive for them –(Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Danica Patrick etc) or the young guns that were nowhere near ready for “the big show” (Alex Rossi, Jonathan Summerton Connor Daly etc).

The amazing amount of paff emanating from Charlotte was ripe for parody so with a colleague of mine, Declan Brennan, and armed with a clunky text to speech animation program we put together a cartoon entitled USF1 the series – Day 1, and stuck it up on You Tube (and it’s still there!) This was only to amuse ourselves and our friends, and was just a bit of gentle ribbing. It was pretty popular so we made another. Following a ill advised feature on SPEED TV showing Steve Matchett being shown round an obviously empty factory by Peter Windsor , we produced another where we for comedic purposes only, imagined that instead of producing a car they were in fact producing Toasters, the series took off and there are now 12 or 13 episodes.

A very funny thing happened in early December, we’d produced 4 or 5 of the sketches and we started to get unsolicited e-mails from guys inside the factory, firstly telling us how much they liked the series (which was nice!) and more surprisingly outlining how shambolic things really were, for example something we couldn’t say at the time was that the first chassis buck had to be discarded because they had forgotten to factor in the steering rack and couldn’t get it to fit! The lack of activity was also communicated to us. We had a couple of American drivers (and a European) outline to us the financial demands the team was putting upon anyone who wanted to drive for them ($8 million – though apparently Robert Doornbos was offered the ride for $5M).

It fast became apparent that the whole project was unravelling, but suddenly, just after announcing all American boy Jose Maria Lopez was their first driver, it went quiet. Nothing.

Suddenly there was talk that the team, who had no F1 car to build, were, in a fantastic display of gallows humour, actually making the USF1 Toaster! We received further information from inside the team and it was apparent by the end of January that not only would the team not make Bahrain but it wouldn’t ever make a car.

The rest is well documented, as the stricken ship lurched from one problem to the next before finally sinking at the beginning of March.

The blame game immediately started and in more than one American publication, the European media was blamed, one article went as far as to explicitly name our cartoon series as responsible for undermining sponsor confidence in the team. Whilst this panders to one’s ego, it is also rubbish. The team floundered because it was built on hot air. I can’t help but feel that Peter and Ken watched “Field of Dreams” once too often, not realising it was a fantasy. “If you build it they will come” is a nice strap line, but the key word is “build”, not issue endless press releases, then backtrack on the original concept and then go into hiding.

The only people responsible for the debacle that was USF1 are Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson. I had no part in their downfall and neither did anyone else.

Great read MD-Ram!