There will be a lot of schadenfreude now that this effort has gone tits up - but it is quite amazing that with a year to prepare and supposedly big hitters like Chad Hurley (founder of Youtube) as potential commercial backers - the whole thing never materialised. Did Hurley get cold feet? - who knows...

Stefan GP - who appear to have the money have been rebuffed - so there will be one less team in what looks like a vintage year for F1.

The one thing USF1 and Stefan GP have in common are the most comically **** unprofessional web sites around. If you paid a monkey to create that garbage by saving a word document as an html document - you would be looking at ten and twenty dollars expenditure - assuming the monkey charged commercially.

FIA release below:

 The US-based Formula One team USF1 will not race this season as planned, and the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) has said it will not be replaced by another team.

“There were issues sponsor-wise in January that knocked us back a few weeks, and those meant we couldn’t make it in 2010,” the team's principal Ken Anderson told the BBC. “No one said it was easy, and we went out on a limb to design and build our own car.”

Anderson said the team had submitted an application to the FIA to rejoin the series in 2011.