"She gets a lot of press": When Danica Patrick's fame caught USF1 director's eye for Formula 1 opportunity

Fresh off her 2008 IndyCar victory in Japan, Danica Patrick became a serious candidate for USF1, a proposed Formula 1 team based in the United States. Thanks to her performances in open-wheel racing and her nationality she was inches away from claiming an F1 seat by only just.

Patrick made her IndyCar debut in 2005, going on to win the Rookie of the Year award and the 2005 Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year accolade. From 2005 to 2010, she was also the IndyCar Series' Most Popular Driver before her move to NASCAR.

Keeping her off-track accolades away, Patrick's Indy Japan 300 win in 2008 was the first by a woman. As a result, she became one of the leading names in women's motorsport, and adding her name to the F1 roster for USF1 made a lot of sense.

"She's great. She gets a lot of press," said USF1 technical director Ken Anderson. "[Indianapolis Motor Speedway president] Tony George would probably be pretty mad with me if I took her out of the IRL but we'll see. I don't know if it's something she wants to do. We'd certainly love to test her and go from there." (via The Guardian)

Besides Patrick, former F1 driver Scott Speed was also in contention for the seat. By 2008, Speed had 28 F1 entries when he raced for Toro Rosso (currently Racing Bulls), Red Bull Racing's sister team. However, none of the drivers made it to F1 as USF1's entry did not go as planned.

US F1 was a proposed Formula 1 team that was granted entry to the sport for the 2010 season. Ken Anderson and Peter Windsor planned to launch the team, with funding from Chad Hurley, the co-founder and former CEO of YouTube, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.

However, they never entered F1 as they failed to finish up the required work and informed the FIA that they were not in a position to compete. As a result, their name was taken off the official entry list. In June 2010, the team was fined €309,000 for failing to compete and was banned from further FIA-sanctioned championships.

---

Danica Patrick entered F1, but not as a driver

After USF1 failed to enter Formula 1, Danica Patrick's chances of racing in the most popular form of motorsport fell flat. However, she did not have to wait as she entered NASCAR in 2010, thanks to her immense talent. Patrick started with the Xfinity Series, and two years later, she joined the Cup Series.

Danica Patrick gets ready to put on her helmet prior to the start of the Firestone Indy 200 at Nashville Superspeedway - Source: Imagn

After racking up 191 races in the Cup Series, and 61 races in the Xfinity, Danica Patrick retired from full-time racing in 2018. A couple of years after her retirement, the Wisconsin-born driver joined Formula 1 as a pundit.

She joined Sky Sports F1 as a pundit for the 2021 United States Grand Prix and stayed with the British broadcasters during the US Grand Prix weekends until her departure in November last year. Interestingly, Danica Patrick was also a pundit for Netflix's F1-related docu-series Drive to Survive's sixth season.