Living the dream: this guy rebuilt an F1 car… so he could race it

Dan Bythewood has spent most of his life chasing his dream. And as he clambers into the cockpit of a V10-engined F1 car – his V10-engined F1 car, resting on a pair of jacks in a workshop in sleepy Bedfordshire – two things stand out: the lengths he’s gone to to make it happen, and just how far he’s come in the process.

Born in Rockville Centre, Long Island in 1974, Dan might as well have grown up on a different planet to Formula 1. A bright boy, he skipped a year of elementary school and sensing even that wasn’t stimulating enough, his parents would take him to Manhattan on the train to audition for parts on TV. Not a bad side-gig if you’re seven. He quickly racked up credits on Jell-O pudding commercials and long-running soap The Doctors, alongside Alec Baldwin no less. Acting wasn’t destined to become the day job, but he earned his own IMDb entry. Albeit with his name spelled wrong. Let’s call it a digital outtake.

When the cameras weren’t rolling, young Dan was feeling the need for speed. The family home was perched next to a humongous hill, and he would drag his Green Machine (“a piece of plastic that just rolls really quick”) all the way to the top before hurtling all the way down again. “When you got to the bottom there wasn't really that much room,” he says. “You hit a grass patch, you hit a driveway and you hit a wall. So if you didn't pull it all together… it was a bad day.”

But up and down he would go. All day long. “It’s really birthed into you,” he reckons. “There's something that attracts you as a human being to speed, controlling that law of inertia, which is really amazing. When you're born it shows up.”

His mum (sorry, mom) could see it too. “Oh he's so driven,” says Alicia. “Will not stop until his goal is set, met, confirmed… he’s always been like that. We’re so proud of him because his dreams have not been easy.”

Ah yes, the dream. By this point Dan wanted nothing more than to be an F1 driver, having caught the bug for it on Wide World of Sports about 40 years before Netflix made it cool. He was a “Senna guy”, his brother a “Prost guy”, and soon enough the entire family was getting up at the crack of dawn to watch F1.

Dan knew getting to the grid was a moonshot, but he had to try. And first he needed a driver’s licence. Being a year younger than his school friends, Dan was sidelined when they all started learning. So rather than wait another 12 months for that first taste of freedom, he went to his folks and innocently asked if he could go visit his grandparents in Florida… where it just so happened you could get your licence two years earlier than in New York. Hey, if you’re a Senna guy and you see a gap… Alicia laughs: “So we knew he was driven to do this kind of thing.”

That wasn’t the only parental deception. Under yet another set of false pretences, Dan snuck out in an MR2 Turbo and headed for Bridgehampton Race Circuit to take part in a driver instruction day on the down-low. “The morning was amazing, I was learning tonnes,” he explains. “We do lunch, I go back out again and as I'm driving back in… oh my God, I'm gonna die. My parents are in the pit. I'm really in a boat tonne of problems right now.”

To this day he doesn’t know how his cunning plan was rumbled, but he needn’t have worried. His folks enjoyed watching him and knowing he wasn’t going to let it go, they encouraged him to do more. The next track day was at Laguna Seca, running a slick-shod single-seater courtesy of the Jim Russell Racing School, followed by another with more aero.

Then came outings with Skip Barber Racing School, plus all manner of arrive-and-drive stuff and a racing licence. Dan even had a go in some F1-imitation machinery (think along the lines of the Lotus T125) on the infield course at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, but he found it frustrating rather than exhilarating. Not least because his foot got trapped under the brake pedal.

Despite getting as much track time as he possibly could, Dan knew that without tens of millions of dollars to fund a junior career, making it to F1 would be impossible. So he knuckled down into the real estate world and set his heart on the next best thing: buying second-hand.

In 2009, he got his chance. When Ross Brawn snapped up the remains of Honda’s F1 team for £1, he immediately ordered a clearout to raise some cash. Among the collection was a 2001 BAR-Honda chassis with its iconic livery; missing its original V10 but otherwise in good nick.

Dan offered to buy it before it went to auction, but he didn’t just want the car. He wanted the rights to it. Why? “I didn’t want a paperweight,” he explains. “I wanted it to run so I could fulfil my lifelong dream of being in Formula 1.” That meant getting hold of a tranche of CAD files (and a letter from Brawn declaring it all legit) so he could faithfully recreate every bolt. And bring it back to life.

As part of the deal, Dan haggled for F1 paddock passes – the kind mere mortals would have to pay for with limbs, had they been allowed in (which they weren’t) – to five grands prix the following season. “You couldn’t beg for those tickets,” he says. His first race was Spa, after which he met Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, and his dad Anthony. And they’ve been friends ever since. “It was amazing because it’s allowed me to get into a world that I really wanted to be in. This is all just living out your childhood dreams, right?”

Meanwhile, the extent of the work needed on the car was becoming clear. Honda had no interest in supplying a fresh engine, so instead Dan unearthed a 3.0-litre Cosworth LK V10 used by Jordan in 2003, which Cosworth itself then brought up to 2005 TJ spec for bulletproof reliability. More complex power required a more complex steering wheel: cue another transplant, from one of Jenson’s old cars as it goes. And later he found the 13-inch rims were past their use-by date (who knew magnesium aged like milk?). He only needed three sets, but it turns out the minimum order for custom OZ Racing rims is 12. So he’s got lots of spares. But the transmission, suspension, aero… that’s all as it was.

All that and more took time. A long time. More than eight years of painstaking work in fact, before the car and its new engine were finally ready for a shakedown; the moment Dan had been working towards ever since he first hauled his Green Machine up that hill in Long Island.

Obviously it wasn’t straightforward. While howling Cosworth V10s sound glorious, they’re also gloriously loud, screaming all the way up to 150dB at 18,600rpm and shattering the noise limits at most circuits. So everything had to be lugged over to Marl-Loemühle Airfield in Germany, where they could unleash all 10 cylinders without fear of deafening the locals. When they fired it up, “it was shooting a three foot flame out of both exhausts”. Sheesh. Is fireproof ear protection even a thing?

Despite the car doing its best Smaug impression, Dan recalls being like a “kid in a candy store” before that first run. “But lots of butterflies. Butterflies because there are people around and you didn't want to look foolish. It was the first time I ever took a car from a dead stop with a clutch on a steering wheel. And then butterflies just driving something that you worked so hard for your entire life to get to.” Not to mention some PTSD from getting his foot stuck under the brake pedal. “It makes it kind of nerve-wracking.”

There is nothing on this planet like a Formula One car. Your mind just can't fathom that you're going to live through braking 60 metres out when you're at 200 miles an hour. It’s mind numbing.

The first run was limited to 10,000rpm and just a couple of gears to ease the engine in. And he couldn’t let loose anyway, because the runway was short and covered in bumps. But even so the car made an instant impression. “There is nothing on this planet like a Formula One car,” he says. The speed he could compute, but the brakes were something else. “Your mind just can't fathom that you're going to live through braking 60 metres out when you're at 200 miles an hour. It’s mind numbing.”

Zen, he calls it. “It's the whole process of driving a piece of machinery that far surpasses what you've ever driven before. And being able to drive the perfect machine for that period of time. It's an engineering marvel.”

The rest of the day went well, progressively cranking it up to 16,000rpm while gathering important data. Everyone back home was desperate to know how it went, so he video called them straight after. “We were very happy,” says Dan’s father, also a Dan. “First time I saw him run a Formula 1 car, that was exciting. But I think it was more exhilarating – over the top – to see him in his own car. It was very, very heartfelt.”

Seven-and-a-half years on, Dan Jnr has faced another long and patient wait for his next go. The Covid pandemic held things up, of course, but there’s not much left to fix now. The basemap needs sorting – that might just be a rogue zero in the coding – and it turns out those flames were caused by 12v fuel injectors; half the size required. Not enough spark to burn all the fuel, you see. Oops.

But barring any more setbacks, 2025 is the year Dan fulfils his F1 dream. On proper racetracks, at proper speeds. That means lots of time practicing on the sim (iRacing has an early 2000s Williams) and getting his neck in shape to handle some big g-forces. The invites are piling up already, and he might even see track time during a real F1 weekend. “It would be cool for that one fraction of a second,” he says. “But the journey is what’s really so epic.”