After few weeks of speculations the FIA has made official that both Marussia and Caterham will not participate in this week American GP in Austin. The two teams went into administration after not being able to secure enough funding to keep the operations going.
It also still remain to be seen if the two team will be able to take part in the final two races in Brasil and Abu Dhabi.
Both Marussia and Caterham joined the Formula One grid in 2010, originally as Virgin and Lotus Racing respectively. Both have enjoyed only limited success, with Marussia securing their first world championship points in this year’s Monaco Grand Prix and Caterham yet to score in 93 race outings.
This came in as a very sad news for the sport because it will prevent 3 young and promising drivers to do their job and entertain the crowd in Austin.
In the modern era of F1 this is the first time the two teams fail to participate to a GP for financial reasons, which also highlights one of the biggest problem of this sport: money. At the moment there’s only a very high ceiling for maximum expenditures, which create huge disparities between bigger and smaller teams. In addition to that, the lack of major technical sponsors for smaller teams and the non-equal distributions of TV rights has always been a matter of concern for the second half of the grid.
At this point there’s not much that can be done if not waiting for the two teams to sort out their financial issues. Let’s hope that this “disease” won’t spread too much among other teams. F1 already has a good amount of problems, dropping teams is certainly not another one that we want to add to the list.