Scott Bennett - January 18, 2010

Scott Bennett is one of US F1 Team's senior designers. A graduate of Automotive Engineering from Loughborough University north of Leicester, Bennett has worked in auto racing notably with Falcon Cars and G Force, as well as the aviation industry. A native of Denver, Colorado, Bennett also designs a line of furniture which can be seen at housefish.com.
Almost nobody knows it, but this team has come an unbelievably long way since it was first announced on Speed TV 11 months ago. I was at that press conference, and I was one of the first three or four people to start working on the design of the car shortly afterwards, all of us crowded with our computers around a wobbly conference table in a dreary, poorly configured former Nascar shop. I wish I had taken pictures.

A strange quirk of my career is that every vehicle I have ever been involved in designing (including a few Indycars, an off-road trophy truck, and a composite aircraft) have all been clean sheet of paper designs. I don't know what it's like to start with something that already exists and try to refine it.

When we started this car, we started with nothing but fundamentals. The majority of a modern F1 car is tightly defined by the rules, so there isn't scope these days to come out with a Lotus 88 or Tyrrell P34. But there is still a daunting set of basic parameters that you have to define before you can even start designing anything - things like wheelbase, drivetrain configuration, suspension layout, weight distribution. And when you're doing it for the first time, you don't have an in-built knowledge of what's worked in the past. Throw in some major rules changes in each of the last two off-seasons, and there are even more unknowns. On the other hand, knowing that you're facing a lot of unknowns also means you don't think you already know everything. Hubris has dashed far more dreams than humility.

I'm extremely fortunate in that I've been able to do most of the car's layout from day one - I've seen and had a hand in almost every step of its evolution. Primarily I've been responsible for the front and rear suspension, particularly packaging. This has been a huge challenge. F1 cars are small, and we are fitting a lot of stuff into a very tight volume. And we're doing a few things quite differently than they have been done in recent years. I can't give specifics (yet), but we've looked at everything with a fresh perspective, and come up with some different answers. We'll know whether they were the right or wrong answers soon enough, but our car certainly won't be a clone of anything else out there. And did you know that we're the only one of the four new teams designing our own gearbox...?

It sounds like a cliché, but I'm quite literally living the dream here, or at least my dream. For almost as far back as I can remember, I would wake up at 6:00am every other Sunday and watch the F1 race with my dad. He was a huge Lotus fan, so of course I was too. When I was nine years old I watched Nigel Mansell collapse pushing his car across the finish line in Dallas. A year later I watched Senna win his first race, a brilliant drive in the rain at Estoril. I would read all the F1 technical books I could get my hands on, examine die cast F1 cars for hours, and try to draw my own. Where my friends wanted to be astronauts or firemen, I wanted to be Colin Chapman.

I ended up going to Loughborough University in England, to get an Automotive Engineering degree, because I figured that would bring me closer to a spot in F1. During my summers home, I got a data acquisition engineering job with Bradley Motorsports, an Indy Lights team based in my hometown of Denver. But things don't always work out the way we plan, and by the time I was finishing my degree I had collected a nice stack of rejection letters from every existing F1 team (and Lotus Cars, of course).

I came to US F1 through a long association with Ken Anderson. We first worked together at Bradley almost exactly 15 years ago. As things worked out, he got the job to design the original G-Force IRL car just as I was finishing up at school, still wondering what the hell I would do with my life. The day after my last exam at Loughborough, I drove down to Sussex and started working on that car, which won its first race, then the Indy 500, and the IRL championship. Ken and I have worked together off and on ever since.

I had given up on ever getting into Formula 1 around a decade ago. By the time I was 25, I had a good degree from a UK university, I had been involved at a high level on the design of a couple of successful top level racing cars, I had designed racing shock absorbers, and I had written suspension geometry and vehicle simulation software. I still couldn't get so much as an interview with a team. I don't hold a grudge about it. I always felt it was more puzzling than anything else.

Almost as long as I have known him, Ken had talked about his plan to someday build an American F1 team, but I never put much stock in it. It seemed such an utterly impossible task. Until a couple of years ago, anyway, when he somehow managed to finally put all the pieces together. And now here we are, only a handful of weeks away from having our car run its first race. In less than a year we've built a very capable shop, put together the smartest and most talented group of people I've ever had the privilege of working with, and designed what should be a fast, reliable, safe, drivable, and yes, beautiful car.

This team means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but for me it's literally a dream come true. When those lights go out at the start of our first race, it will be both the end of a long road, and the start of a new one. I can't wait.