The new US F1 team is lining up Jose Maria Lopez as its first driver - provided the 26-year-old Argentine can put together a full sponsorship package.
Lopez announced on his personal website that he had concluded a provisional deal with US F1 after a visit to its factory in North Carolina earlier this week.
He has now returned to Argentina to work on finding the rest of the money required to secure his first Formula 1 race seat.
Lopez fell off the F1 radar in recent years after being hotly-tipped in the mid-1990s.
He won the 2003 Renault V6 Championship - the fore-runner of the World Series that Robert Kubica and Sebastian Vettel used as an F1 springboard - and then impressed in Formula 3000 a year later.
That earned him a place on Renault's driver development programme, and he was the team's F1 test driver for a while.
But he was unable to become a regular winner in GP2 and had to return to Argentina for the 2007 season.
Lopez then settled into his homeland's TC2000 touring car championship, which he is set to win for a second straight year if he can collect a few points from the final round later this month.
US F1's long-term aim is to bring American drivers into the world championship, but team bosses Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson have always admitted that with few suitable US racers available at the moment, its initial line-up will probably feature drivers from other nations.
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