Lotus, Virgin and Hispania were the FIA's 'great white hope'; the federation's way of proving that F1 could buck the recession by attracting new teams, particularly after car manufacturers had fled the sport. However, after 12 races they have come nowhere near to their billing with none of the new teams scoring a point.

Bernie Ecclestone has said he is not happy with their performance and added that he would not be surprised if one or two don't make it to the end of the season. Many people may be thinking that the new teams have actually damaged F1 but no one has actually said it. Until now.

In this month's issue of Motor Sport magazine, Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt interviews former BAR team principal David Richards who says "what [the new teams] have done is disillusion anyone of the idea that you could at all be competitive and it has also prejudiced raising funds."

Richards' engineering firm Prodrive was granted an F1 grid slot in 2008 however it could not compete since the FIA failed to approve rules allowing teams to share car chassis. Last year Prodrive applied again for a slot but was rejected in favour of Hispania, Virgin and USF1, which failed to even raise enough funds to race. In contrast, Prodrive raised £40m for its F1 bid but according to Richards it would not be able to do this now in light of the poor performance of the new teams.

"The performance of the new teams has harmed that ability," he says adding "everyone had a dream, and I am sure Richard Branson had a dream a year ago, that starting a new team would somehow challenge the establishment well, we never believed that."

Richards believes that the close competition at the top of the grid has taken attention off the poor performance of the new teams. "Had that not been the case we might have by mid-year started to see the recriminations and people starting to question what is going on at the back of the grid," he says.

The tender to fill USF1's slot next year is still out but we should soon know if any team will take it up and whether one or two more slots may be vacant by the time that it is filled.

Given that the FIA was reported to the European Commission over an alleged anti-competitive bias towards Cosworth in the selection process of the new teams, their introduction into the sport has hardly been the stuff of dreams.