USF1 Car to Debut at Barber in February

Pete Windsor has gone on record saying the USF1 Team's 2010 F1 car will get its first test at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama in Feb.

According to a story on PlanetF1 -- brought to my attention by alert readers Johnny and Rob Sims -- "Formula One this season, and the only one based outside Europe, the team have been given special dispensation by the FIA to initially test on home soil."

Read all the stunning quotes from USF1's Peter Windsor HERE.

Comments

[Dylan]

Words cannot describe this, well, words that wouldn't get blocked at least!

Barber, a track to tight for Motorcyles, and way, way to tight for Indycars, is going to be where they start off from? WTF!!!?!?!

Okay, so why not test at a real track, such as Sebring, Road Atlanta, or Laguna Seca?

The mixing of Barber and USGE is good in one way, it mixes two groups of people who are really good at hype, really bad with results.

[The Speedgeek]

Dude, it's their shake down venue. They could do that just about anywhere. Some F1 teams do this on air strips, so as to avoid falling afoul of the "no testing" rules. They're not going to be running flat out for the first day or so, so pretty much any piece of road that goes left and right is OK. They're not going to be doing set up work, it's just to make sure that the thing will go around a race track for more than a few laps at a time without springing leaks or stopping on course. The real set up work will start when they ship the cars to Valencia.

BMP is one of the handiest road courses to Charlotte, so that's why they're doing it there. Laguna would be too far of a trip for just a shake down. Road Altanta may already be booked or something. Sebring could potentially shake the car to bits (it's far rougher than any existing F1 track). It's pretty much as simple as that.

Oh, and Barber is just fine to drive on. It's just not good to race on.

[pressdog]

Agreed, Geek. Since they literally built these cars from zero and by hand, they just need some place to drive around on.

[Leigh O'Gorman]

@ Dylan,

This test at Barber is purely to make sure the basics of the car work.
Better to find out when they are close to base that something might have issues rather than discover problems when they get to Europe.

[Dylan]

Your all right, of course. It's just something about USGPE testing at Barber is wrong, and it worries me greatly. They won't hit very high speeds at all. oF course, this assumes they get a car built in time.