As it was announced, FIA has decided that noone of the vacant 13th slot on the grid candidates were wealthy enough to support an F1 team bringing huge disappointment to the 2 major contenders. The Epsilon Euskadi team and the Villeneuve-Durango F1 project.
However, the 1997 F1 champion Jacques Villeneuve seems unstoppable by the FIA World Motor Sport Council and has revealed on his website (in comparison to earlier secrecy of Villeneuve-Durango F1 project bid) that the future Villeneuve Racing team will now look at options open to them for the purchase of an existing Formula 1 team, with which to enter the championship.
Under these circumstances, there are 2 possible candidates for a purchase. The Italy based Toro Rosso which belongs to Dietrich Mateschitz as a RedBull junior team and struggling Hispania Racing Team.
Mateschitz has expressed in the past his desire to sell his junior team in order to concentrate both to RedBull's F1 and NASCAR projects and the fact that Durango IS based on Italy gives rumours more importance. On the other side HRT has been struggling in the back on the field for the whole season, running out of funds which caused the substitution of Indian Karun Chnadhok with Sakon Yamamoto just because the Japanese can bring sponsoring money on the organization. Moreover the Spanish team runs out of a chassis provider as HRT doesm't posses the necessary resources for the design and construction of an F1 chassis. According to rumours, Epsilon Euskadi is also looking for an F1 partner and Spanish based Hispania Racing Teams seems ideal for a Spanish F1 Alliance. It is believed that there is already talks between the owners of the two Spanish organisations, Epsilon Euskadi's chief Joan Villadelprat and HRT's Jose Ramon Carabante.
Although the announcement at his website, Villeneuve hasn't made any major confirmations about a specific F1 purchase leaving an alternative riddle on Dominic Fugere of French-Canadian web-portal Rue Frontenac. And it seems that he has implied that he is interested only to buy an F1 entry and not the infrastructure of an existing team reminding strongly the disastrous Reynard-B.A.R. project back in 1999. He stated that his project includes the design of a chassis right from the scratch and he's not interested in already designed 2011 chassis making HRT, who runs out of a 2011 chassis deal, ideal for his project.
"We will now return to our original plan, which was our plan B, that is to say, to takeover one of the existing teams. It will probably cost more and we must ensure that we have a free hand with the team. We do not want to be with partners we would not have chosen. We will also see that there are contracts in place to avoid them interfering with our plans. For example, we have tremendous confidence in the design of our car. We want to be able to use it, not to have the old design already in place imposed on us. I still have to sit with my partners and establish a strategy. However, I am pleased that we continued to work on NASCAR. Things are going well on that side."
