Is the Formula 1 auto racing league finished?  Done?  Toast?  Kaput?  It’s beginning to look like the bloated and troubled circuit is as dead as Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue parrot.

The collapse isn’t sudden, but has been coming on for several years as the costs of fielding a team of two cars has shot up to where it takes several hundreds of millions of dollars per year to operate the team.  It hasn’t helped that the principal leader of the FIA, the sanctioning body for the race circuit, Max Mosley was tossed out after a particularly kinky sex scandal invoving Nazi uniforms, prostitutes and a collectin of whips.  (see Firegeezer report HERE.)

It was speculated that most of the top teams would pull out of the league and start their own series, but that has calmed down a bit while they first seek to restructure the FIA from within.  But they are still bleeding when it comes to participants that have the money to keep it afloat.  Earlier this year BMW and Honda both announced that they were leaving immediately.  Honda sold their team in toto to a British playboy for 1£ and he competed the entire season winning the championship with Honda’s equipment.  Then Renault, one of F-1′s oldest and staunchest teams, was forced to bail out following a near-criminal cheating scandal that almost wrecked the circuit itself.

Now more bombs have been dropped on F-1.  Yesterday Toyota announced that they would not be competing in next year’s campaign and that they are disbanding their F-1 racing programs completely and permanently.  This followed by a day an announcement from Bridgestone Tires (the owners of the Firestone brand) that after their contract with F-1 as the exclusive tire supplier for the circuit expires at the end of next season, they will not renew it and will no longer provide tires for the cars.

Making it a Japanese triple-play, the Fuji International Speedway where the Japanese Grand Prix is held, said that they will not renew their contract to hold any F-1 races after next year’s program.  If the racing league does survive, it will emerge in a different form and will also be solely through the efforts of Ferrari who are trying their best to salvage it.  No doubt, there’s more to come.

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While we’re on a driving theme this morning, let’s illustrate the costly consequences of driving while drunk.  This forklift operator in a Moscow, Russia, vodka warehouse was already 3 sheets into it when he was assigned to move some stock.  As it turned out, he moved more than $150,000 worth of the vodka to the wrong place:

Cheers

Hey, I’ll get us some coffee now while you get our own equipment checked out.  We’ll meet a little later in the day room.