Glenn Freeman

rescue the project and one of the people who'd been working with chad hurley was now trying to find another way onto the grid and by this point it wasn't doing another usf1 it was trying to buy into a team because the feeling was that actually starting from scratch was pretty much impossible

The person who was still cracking on with this was a guy called Paris Mullins, who, John, you interviewed for Autosport at the time.

And Mullins said then, a competitive startup team simply isn't possible given the state of the sport and its rules.

He said teams needed experience and knowledge from years of competing and that taking over a team and making necessary changes was the way to go.

Citing Braun taking over Honda, Red Bull taking over Jaguar and then Minardi, Force India taking over BMW,

Jordan Midland Spiker, that being the way to do it.

He also said there were a great deal of people in the US who want to be involved in F1 because it had this global appeal.

So even if the US market didn't yet understand F1 in the way that it does today, companies found it more appealing than domestic series like IndyCar or NASCAR because of that global reach.

John, as I said, you did this interview at the time.

Do you think he's been proved right by everything that's happened with F1's incredible growth in the US in the last decade?

We'll be right back.

But he felt the Lotus story had already moved on from people wondering if they would survive.

And he wasn't taking any criticism or negativity around their performance seriously.

However, he also felt that F1 needed to change, saying the costs needed to be addressed and that the sport should be simplified and made more fun.

Although alongside that, he said it should move closer to the car industry to become a good provider of knowledge.

what's more fun than the car industry you can't simplify it and make it car industry relevant i think that's been f1's problem for about 30 years now ed anyway let's talk about lotus a back market team i don't know a modern ed's sheds contender you might say was lotus getting much respect in the paddock at this stage of 2010 i guess purely from being the best of those new teams that were coming in and struggling so much

Yeah, so that's the best of the new teams.

Let's talk about the worst next, because HRT was in the news before Turkey as it had split with Dallara, which had designed and built the team's first car.

In announcing the split in quite a lengthy statement, actually, the two sides said that they felt they had achieved more than could have been reasonably expected by just about getting the team's cars ready for that first weekend.

in Bahrain.