It doesn't look good for Super Aguri. They missed the complete pre-season testing due to lack of money - if I'm not mistaken their car wasn't driven even once on a track - they did no official presentation (my guess: lack of money) and their paint scheme looking quite virgin-like, i.e. no major sponsors apart from Honda.

Now they are desperately claiming they will appear in Melbourne but the question is: will they start? And if, will they appear in Malaysia?

Combine this with legal hassles with Williams and Force India over customer cars and I highly doubt they will make it through the whole season.

I thought Super Aguri had been sold?

No they haven't.

I heard they are speaking with investors but this all seems not very fruitful. And there is a lot of issues to solve in that case like "will Honda continue to deliver engine and chassis and how much are they going to charge".

And the customer chassis case isn't still resolved which will give any potential investor an awful lot of uncertainty. Dave Richards - who has several years of experience as a team leader in F1 - didn't start his F1 operation with Prodrive just because of that issue. So why should anyone less experienced take this risk and buy himself into Super Aguri?

Who knows, maybe they're going to pull some good deals with new investors. Either way, they haven't done any testing with the new regulations which obviously won't help their improvement as a team when the season starts. Even if they pull some nice funding out of their asses, I think this season will be their last.

I think they may have done some testing in an interim car at the end of last year, not 100% on that though. I think Honda will be looking to get rid of them, so they can concentrate their efforts on their own campaign, which from pre-season testing looks set to be a dismal first half of the season at least.

Oh and those green trousers seen at the launch will be worn by the Honda mechanics in the pit lane! Doh!

I hate that Honda's sucking so much ass...Button needs to get the hell out.

I think things will slowly start to turn around under Brawn, but it's not going to be a stellar season straight away.

Somehow, I think the money spent on the Brawn acquisition, along with the revamp of the organization left Honda Racing with insufficient funds to cater to Super Aguri. That's just a guess though. Maybe Honda wants to focus all of their efforts onto their main team, since they've got a championship winner in their hands now.

Hm, I can't imagine this.

I don't know what Brawn will earn but I doubt it will be a lot more than 5 million USD. Take another 5 million for restructuring (I doubt it will be that much) and you are at 3% additional costs for Honda F1, at an estimated yearly budget of 300 - 400 million USD.

I hate to be right.

Shame for the guys who put in a lot of hard work to get there and the drivers especially. But I did hear that some of the team were cowboys that didn't really know what they were doing and didn't have experience in F1, just assumed that stuff would be the same as their previous motorsport ventures - one of the guys was even banned from Honda's factory in Brackley.

Raise a glass of Sake for the Super Best Friends.

And I hope Nick Fry will step into a nail when he performs his dance of joy. A very big nail!

...so I wasn't 100% right...

Aren't there also rules coming into effect which will kill these secondary teams off? I thought the FIA was working to ban the sharing of technology (which seems contrary to their stated goal of making the sport more affordable).

If this is the case maybe Honda realized that it was only a matter of time till SA went tits up and decided that the money could be better spent elsewhere.

The new rules that take place in 2010 deem that customer cars are illegal.

i.e. Team Budget can't buy rolling chassis' off of, say, Ferrari

This is why Scuderia Toro Rosso is trying to sell itself off. Mateschitz doesn't want it around anymore since they can't use Red Bull's cars anymore. Red Bull Engineering is the company that technically supplies the Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso teams with cars, however, from 2010 they can only technically supply the cars to one team... that being RBR. Or RBR might just absorb RBE. Whatever method they go with this'll leave STR out in the cold.

Yeah what a dick.