The former F1 wing of the Toyota Motorsport company has cancelled a planned technical partnership with the struggling Hispania Racing team, after the Spanish team failed to meet the "contractual payment obligations".
The news will come as a blow to the Hispania squad, which had been easily the slowest of the three newcoming teams in the 2010 season.Last season, they used a Dallara-designed chassis, but they parted company with the Italian manufacturer early on in the season following a breakdown in their relationship.
Since then, the team has been searching for a new technical partnership, and have long been linked with the Toyota company, which departed from the F1 grid at the end of the 2009 season.
The proposed deal between the two would have allowed HRT use of the old Toyota F1 facilities in their base in Cologne, and would have seen the team base their 2011 car around Toyota's own unraced 2010 car design.
Further reports on the planned partnership suggested that the deal also included use of Toyota's wind tunnels, and the secondment of 100 Toyota staff to work with Hispania.
That same design was also linked with the Stefan GP team's bid for an F1 spot at the start of the 2010 season.
However, issues over 'payment obligations' seem to have now scuppered the proposed deal, an announcement that may well lead to new questions being asked about the financial future of the backmarking team.
"Toyota Motorsport GmbH (TMG) confirms that all cooperation with Hispania Racing F1 Team (HRT) has been terminated and will not resume," a statement from Toyota, released on Monday, confirmed.
"TMG retains all intellectual property rights to its current F1 car and is completely free to pursue other projects and support new customers for its high-performance engineering services.
"TMG regrets that HRT has not met its contractual payment obligations and will pursue all available options to reach a satisfactory conclusion to this matter."
The Hispania squad had been hoping for a happier 2011 season, after a terrible debut year, and recently signed a technical deal to use Williams-sourced gearboxes next year, as well as securing a commercial partnership with ex-Telefonica boss Juan Villalonga.
The news about HRT's failure to make payments to confirm the Toyota partnership also follows a report from the rarely-trustworthy Turun Sanomat newspaper in Finland, which suggested that the team was selling test drives in their car at this week's young driver test for 200,000 Euros.
Earlier on Monday, HRT confirmed that GP2 duo Josef Kral and Davide Valsecchi will complete their testing line-up, alongside GP2 champion and Williams target Pastor Maldonado, though there was no confirmation as to whether the drivers had paid for their test chance.
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