With the USF1 team confirming that they are having cash flow problems and are looking to the FIA to smile favourably upon them and grant them permission to miss the first four races of the season, something that looks more and more unlikely to occur, all eyes turn to Stefan Grand Prix as the ones to take their place in the 2010 Formula One world championship if the American based outfit fails to make it.

Now that Campos has been secured together with assurances that they will be there on the Bahrain grid, Stefan Grand Prix waits patiently by in the hope that they can secure entry into the championship. With a car already to go, the 2010 build of the now defunct Toyota Racing team, their first testing session aimed for this week at the Portimao circuit in Portugal, and their first driver, Kazuki Nakajima already confirmed, there is just one thing missing....FIA approval.

So, we have a team with an entry but no car, no money and no way of making it to Bahrain, and a team that is already waiting in Bahrain, a half way decent car and no entry. The FIA wont grant approval to the team at this late stage and it more than likely won’t grant approval to USF1 to delay the start to their championship, so there is only one real solution.....USF1 will need to sell their FIA entry to Stefan.

Whether or not this will actually happen is anyone’s guess as it would mean USF1 admitting utter defeat in their quest to enter the series, especially when they have had the longest amount of time to get ready out of all the new teams.

Setting up a new team is never easy, or cheap, however, one of USF1’s founders, Peter Windsor, confirmed to us twelve months ago that they were already very healthy economically speaking and that it wouldn’t take much more to ensure their continued health. At the time we were told that things were already done financially speaking, in terms of designing and building the car and in order to have the cars on the grid….

“…but we haven’t really thought about sponsorship as yet because the operating costs are well within the range of everything we need to achieve and we need to raise a relatively small amount of sponsorship just to be in the black in 2010,” Peter Windsor explained to us last February.

If this was the case twelve months ago, one has to wonder just where it all went so horribly wrong....