Tavo Hellmund, promoter of the US Grand Prix, looks a little like Jim Carrey and he shares the Canadian actor's rapid-fire manner of speaking. On this seemingly unlikely head and shoulders rests nothing less than the hope of interest in F1 from an entire nation.

In the weeks since the announcement that Full Throttle Productions, the company which Hellmund founded, will be promoting the US GP, Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt has had numerous emails, phone calls and a meeting with him arranged by F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. Drawing on this contact Sylt explains here why he believes that Hellmund is just the man that Uncle Sam needs.

Soon after Ecclestone's business, Formula One Management (FOM), announced that Full Throttle had been awarded a ten-year contract to host the US Grand Prix in the city of Austin in Texas from 2012 the criticism started to flood in. In the past five years F1 has moved into four new countries and although reception was mixed on the announcement that they would be added to the calendar, few attracted scepticism of the race ever taking place. That all changed last year when Donington Ventures Leisure (DVL) revealed that it would not be able to honour its contract to host the British GP from 2010 due to a lack of funds.

Like DVL, Full Throttle has never before promoted an F1 race, at the outset its backers were also unclear and whereas DVL only needed to make modifications to the circuit, Full Throttle had yet to begin construction of the track in Austin. However, in just a few weeks Hellmund began to show that any comparisons with DVL were on paper only. He has announced the location of the circuit, named his key backers and even revealed that he has $25m of state support - something which Silverstone has failed to pull off despite its 60 years of history. However, perhaps Hellmund's strongest asset is his heritage within F1 itself.

Tavo Hellmund is not a name which many people were familiar with prior to him being revealed as the US GP promoter. However, one person knew him very, very well and he is the man who matters.

Ecclestone says with a rare smile that he has known Hellmund "since before he was born." It is almost not an exaggeration since his father, Gustavo Hellmund-Rosas, was president of Mexico's Grand Prix organising committee when the race was held in the late 1980s.

Hellmund junior was inducted into the world of motorsport at an early age when he became a gopher at Ecclestone's Brabham F1 team. "I did that so I had an inside track on how F1 worked and what Bernie was doing back then to grow it into what it is today," says Hellmund adding "I have known Bernie for almost 40 years." It didn't take long for this to pay off in his career.

Whilst working his way up racing's ranks Hellmund followed in his father's footsteps and began promoting events. In the early 1990s the untimely death of one of his friends at the hands of a drunk driver led Hellmund to found a campaign called 'safe and sober' which involved motor racing drivers attending schools to educate pupils about wearing a seat belt and not drinking and driving. "A kid who is 17 years old doesn't listen to their teacher or unfortunately even a mother whose kid has been killed but they will listen to someone who they think is cool," says Hellmund.

With the support of General Motors the campaign became so successful that Hellmund "ended up doing 350 presentations at 400 high schools in the south west of the US." It grew into a year-round after-school programme called Racing For Education which Hellmund says was "about educating why it is important to stay in school, to not drink and drive and to not to be in a gang. We did that state wide and that was a really successful programme." So successful indeed that Hellmund was commended by the then-US president Bush for it.