Over the past few weeks it has become abundantly clear that the phantom bid for F1 from News Corp suits Ferrari just fine. As Pitpass predicted, nearly two weeks ago, the involvement of the Exor investment fund, which ultimately owns a stake in Ferrari, gives the Italian team perceived leverage in the ongoing negotiations with F1's boss Bernie Ecclestone about the division of the sport's profits. It may seem like leverage to Ferrari but in fact, as Ecclestone knows all too well, it is really no less fanciful than FOTA's 2009 threatened rival series which lasted all of six days.

The Concorde Agreement - the contract which outlines the distribution of F1's profits - expires at the end of next year and negotiations about signing a new draft began last year. Ferrari has been given impressive concessions in previous years by using the strong-arm tactic of threatening to race in a rival series to F1. In 2005 Ecclestone paid the team $100m to stop its threat then in 2009 Ferrari was appeased by the FIA dropping its controversial team budget cap. However it has cried wolf one too many times.

As Pitpass' business editor Chris Sylt reported in December last year, after the laughable 2009 threat, which was over almost as soon as it began, Ferrari really had to come up with a new threat. The idea of a rival series really would be derided by everyone from Ecclestone right down to the fans.

In fact, Ecclestone had got so tired of the same old threat being wheeled out year after year that written into the current Concorde is a clause preventing the teams from publicly threatening a rival series until the end of 2012. What's more, with only two major car manufacturers now competing in F1, it was crazy to imagine that they could fund a rival series as had been proposed in previous iterations of the threat.

In December Pitpass suggested that instead, the teams should threaten to "only race half of the Grands Prix and they will choose which ones to attend." It seems that Ferrari had another idea.

When Sky News' blogger Mark Kleinman trumpeted the 'news' in April that News Corp was thinking of possibly bidding for F1 (but may never do so) he added that it "has been in preliminary talks in recent weeks with people connected to at least one of F1's big car manufacturers." Now who could that have been?

We didn't have to wait long to find out as two weeks later News Corp and Exor released a statement which was even more heavily caveated than Kleinman's original article. It proclaimed that it had joined with Exor to consider whether to bid for the sport but added that "there can be no certainty that this will lead to an approach to Formula One's current owners."

Pitpass, followed by the rest of the world, started to realise that it looked highly suspicious for any company to announce that it may bid for something before it had even approached the owners. In fact, it almost sounded like a threat - that if F1's majority owner CVC doesn't watch it News Corp and Exor may make a bid for their asset. Pitpass bets that Ecclestone didn't see that 'threat' coming. It even foxed FIA president Jean Todt who said last weekend "I feel it's strange [for someone] to say we want to buy before we know it's for sale. I think the first action would be for whoever is keen to take over the commercial rights to find out with CVC what is the situation."

True to form, once Exor had confirmed its involvement in the phantom bid, the floodgates were opened. First Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali said "at the moment everything is calm, but soon something will happen... A marketing partner is needed. It can be [F1's majority owner] CVC once more, but it must invest in F1 and develop." Then, on Friday Ferrari's president, Luca di Montezemolo, said "at the end of 2012, the contracts of every single team with CVC will expire. So, we have... alternatives...We renew with CVC, or we theoretically--as the basketball teams did in the US, with great success, we can create our own company, like the NBA. Just to run the races, the TV rights and so."

It seemed di Montezemolo thinks that the News Corp-Exor phantom bid gives him the support to yet again threaten an alternative to the status quo. However, Ecclestone is laughing just as much now as he was in 2009 when he was faced with a phantom series to rival F1 - now it's a phantom bid for F1.

The reality is that there is no way that News Corp and Exor would fund a rival series. Neither firm exists to invest in startup businesses and the risk of going up against F1 would be gigantic. Just to give a tiny indication, a rival series couldn't be called F1, Formula One, Formula Grand Prix, Formula GP or GP1 since CVC owns the rights to all these names. It couldn't even call its races Grands Prix. That's in addition to the fact that News Corp and Exor would face all the same hurdles which would be encountered if they were to make a bid for F1.

In addition, as explained above, the teams are prevented from publicly threatening a rival series before the end of 2012 so they aren't even allowed to claim that News Corp and Exor would back them in one. Exor can talk about an F1 takeover, since it isn't directly connected to Ferrari, but the teams cannot.

So, what kind of threat could be created with the News Corp and Exor phantom bid? In a nutshell, the teams want more money from F1 and so any threat would involve saying that if they don't get it then something will happen. But what something? It can't be a rival series for the reasons mentioned above.