Mounting speculation surrounds the future of BMW's participation in Formula One tonight, as rumours gather that the German manufacturer will announce plans to quit the sport at the end of 2009 in a press conference tomorrow.
BMW have called an emergency press conference in it's Munich headquarters for tomorrow, and the smart money is on this to be for the revelation that they will be leaving the sport as soon as possible.
Invitations to the press conference say that the meeting has been called due to "current developments in motor sport."
BMW's F1 boss Mario Theissen will be present at the press conference, along with Dr. Norbert Reithofer, the head of the BMW board, and Dr. Klaus Draeger, the director for development. Both of which have excellent 1960s Bond villain names. The presence of such a stellar cast of BMW patriarchs infers that the conference will be for more than just the announcement of another rubbish aero package.
Officials within the company could only confirm that the reason for the meeting was "important news."
The potential pullout follows a dismal first half of 2009 for the BMW Sauber team, which BMW bought control of for the start of the 2006 season. After three years of steady forward progress from the midfield to the front, with Robert Kubica winning the Canadian GP and making a half-arsed challenge for the title last year, this year has been a disaster.
Many had predicted that the team would become fully-fledged title contenders in 2009, but the new car has proved to be abysmal, with Kubica and Nick Heidfeld regularly struggling to escape from the first part of qualifying, and the team sitting 8th in the constructors standings. Without Heidfeld's enormously flukey 2nd place in the rain-shortened Malaysian GP, the team would be ahead of only pointless Force India in the standings.
Their problems have been exacerbated by a needless attempt at mastering the KERS technology, which Theissen has championed strongly. But the device never ran strongly, with Kubica barely running with it due to weight issues, and the technology was dropped from the car midway through the season.
Despite their slow start to the year, updates have continued to arrive from HQ, though few have looked like improving the pace of the F1.09.
Theissen has always maintained that the form of 2009 had no bearing on BMW's decision to continue with their F1 project, despite the company posting first-quarter pre-tax losses of 55 million Euros in May.
Back in May, Theissen insisted: "We analysed and evaluated the situation and the F1 programme with the board prior to the start of the season in February. It was overall a very positive evaluation and judgement, and that hasn't changed.
"Apparently everybody is disappointed about the sporting results, but other than that there is no news and we have not discussed it since."
However, despite his confident words, the mutterings were that a review was always planned for July, and that this review meeting may be behind the press conference tomorrow.
If BMW are to pull out, it would be the second manufacturer loss to the sport of F1 in the last year, with Honda leaving before the start of this year. It would also provisionally drop next year's entry list to 24 cars, assuming the old Sauber team that the marque continued to namedrop on it's cars after the buyout doesn't make a return.
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