The announcement that Honda are selling up is in some ways little surprise - to make fast cars and pay fast drivers to drive them around tracks against other fast cars is an unbelievably expensive pursuit, and when there are tough financial straits, something often has to give. Something doesn't quite add up in the BBC assessment though...

BBC sports news correspondent Adam Parsons says the team is for sale for £1 - although any buyer would need to find a budget in the region of £40m to operate it in 2009.

Well, that's pretty reasonable - doesn't it just make you want to take out a tenner and buy it ten times over? Worry about the £40m later, that's probably fine. All said, though, £40m to operate the team for a year, pay staff, travel and so forth - well, that doesn't seem too bad for a multi-million pound company like Honda, or even a potential new investor. So is that how much Honda were spending? Let's check the info-box.

Team costs Honda £200m annually with more than 800 staff at Brackley.

Ah, so actually it's 20% of what it currently costs Honda. That's quite a big difference. No one will notice, though.

So Honda could have made some heavy cutbacks, since they were spending roughly 5 times as much a year as Adam Parsons says that they need to to be one of the least effective teams in Formula One, or maybe even keep spending the same amount, since they currently have 'minimal advertising' - some ads on the car and some sponsorship could be really helpful. An example of this working would be Renault. An example of a co-operative agreement which worked quite well on this front was BAR-Honda, who Honda bought out at the end of 2005 after the team were second only to Ferrari the previous year. It makes it a lot more affordable and practical to make a fast car for a fast driver to drive fast.

Bernie Ecclestone obviously didn't have time to bend Honda's ear on this decision:

"I've no doubt Honda would have been in top four next year without any problems."