It isn't that often that making a £4.5m loss can be considered good news but in the wacky world of F1 finances this is exactly what happens.

A report in today's Independent newspaper by Pitpass writers Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid shows that F1's Super Aguri team made a £4.5m loss in its first year in the sport. Given that it is one of the few teams not to be owned by a billionaire or a car manufacturer this is pretty good going.

Super Aguri is owned by its namesake former Japanese F1 driver Aguri Suzuki (right) and, making its relatively small loss all the more impressive, the team was only established four months before competing in its first F1 race in 2006. Its 83 employees pale in comparison to the 538 staff at McLaren and the 508 at Renault.

Yet despite their financial support, many F1 teams still struggle to break even and some have made even bigger losses than Super Aguri. In 2002, BAR made a whopping £31.8m loss, last year Williams' loss hit £28m and in 2005, Jordan finished the year £20m in the red.

With one of the smallest incomes of any of the 11 F1 teams, Super Aguri only files accounts which don't show turnover. Industry monitor Formula Money estimates that its sponsors paid a total of just $5m in 2006. In contrast, F1's best-sponsored team is Ferrari which received over $180m last year.

The secret to Super Aguri's survival has been its partnership with car manufacturer Honda which is its technical partner and supplies engines in exchange for advertising space on the car.

At a time when Prodrive is struggling to get into the sport, F1 teams could perhaps look at how Super Aguri has managed to run such a lean outfit and follow its example. There's no doubt that F1 is an expensive sport to participate in but Super Aguri's accounts show that that doesn't necessarily mean that a team's expenditure has to be sky-high.