BMW team member barred from entering US

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Robert Kubica’s race engineer has been refused a visa to enter America for the United States Grand Prix.

Mehmi Admadi would have been working on Sebastian Vettel’s car this weekend, but United States’ much-criticised immigration services refused him entry to the country.

He has returned to the team’s Switzerland base. You hope the fact that he is Iranian has nothing to do with it.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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3 comments on “BMW team member barred from entering US”

  1. Do I think American customs are so dense that they would think a Formula 1 engineer is a spy or terrorist?

    Yes.

    My coworker is from the former soviet Republic of Georgia. She tried to mail Christmas presents back to her home country, and then was told by the postman that the country where she was born does not exist.

  2. My hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis at the moment) is that the American system for processing immigration is not in fact capable of processing everyone who wants to come in. The whole anti-“terrorist”-immigration thing may well be a cover for a method of reducing system workload. I have heard anecdotal reports that at least one person was barred for the “crime” of flying a plane from Heathrow to Dallas. It is also possible that someone with a similarly-spelt name to Mehmi Admani is on the restricted list for some reason. Systems of this type in all countries are notorious for struggling to differentiate between similarly-spelt names.

  3. I think that Bernie should take this into account while negotiating future F1 races in the USA. This time it is Kubica’s / Vettel’s car that will be affected. But what if one of the genuine title contenders could not use his race engineer during the whole weekend ?

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