"Obviously for the Super Aguri team members, as well as for Mr. Suzuki himself, it really is a horrifying moment when you realize you’re $50m+ in debt to Honda and you really can’t go on any further."

Nice to see Hobbs on the site. He's a Rock Star!!!

I believe Mr. Hobbs is on the mark regarding the fact that money for racing sponsorship is not as easily obtained as it was in the last 5 - 10 years. I had to chuckle at Mr. Eccelstone's comments during the Turkish GP broadcast with Mr. Winsdor with regard to turning away sponsors because they weren't up to F-1 standards. If there was a pool of such sponsors, why didn't Mr. Eccelstone direct a few of them to Super Aguri to help them out? Maybe F-1 needs to scale back on its Mega-buck hospitality centers and get back to its roots of innovative engineering and technical solutions to developing and competing the most advanced race cars in the world, and forget all of this superfulous overhead.

Well said, David. In the early 90s F1 fields had 26 cars, looked like NASCAR compared to today! Remember the Arrows sponsorship debacle with "Nigerian prince"? this is 2nd time recently a team has folded because of sponsor not coming up with $ mid-season.

schumithecat - 12 May 2008 06:40 PM

Well said, David. In the early 90s F1 fields had 26 cars, looked like NASCAR compared to today! Remember the Arrows sponsorship debacle with "Nigerian prince"? this is 2nd time recently a team has folded because of sponsor not coming up with $ mid-season.

In the 90's budgets were much smaller, there were more privateers compared to manufacturers, not to mention there were more lax rules to enter into F1 than it is now. After the debacles of Andrea Moda, Mastercard Lola, among others, they cracked down on what was required to become an entry into the FIA F1 World Championship.