Manufacturers yet to rule out legal action

As previously revealed by autosport.com, Formula One's teams met several times at last weekend's United States Grand Prix to thrash out a compromise deal that should see part-homologation introduced from the start of next year.

It is hoped that the 'Indianapolis Agreement' will get presented to the F1 Commission for ratification, providing that all of F1's teams sign the document. Should the F1 Commission approve it, then it would have to go the FIA World Council for a final sign off.

Honda Racing, BMW, Toyota and McLaren have previously threatened to take the FIA to court over the plans for future engine rules, especially if the FIA tried to impose engine homologation in the sport from the start of next year.

They believe such a move would be a breach of the Concorde Agreement which promises to maintain the engine formula until the start of 2008.

However, FIA president Max Mosley has already made it clear that a change of engine rules for 2007 will only take place with the unanimous agreement of all teams.

Mosley's clarification, along with the teams' support for the Indianapolis Agreement, should have put stop to the legal threat, but the manufacturers involved have drawn short of making that promise.

Honda Racing boss Nick Fry believes that only a positive outcome from this week's crunch meetings will guarantee the end of a possible legal action.

"Let's wait until we have had the F1 Commission and the World Council," he said when asked whether the threat of legal action was now over.

"We need to have this signed, sealed and delivered before I think you could say that absolutely. But let's hope."

Fry said he hoped that the FIA would accept the Indianapolis Agreement, even though the FIA believes that only a full engine freeze is sufficient to reduce costs in F1.

"We will see on Thursday when we have the F1 Commission," he said. "It seems to us to be a sensible compromise in that probably everyone is either equally happy or equally unhappy depending on which way you look at it.

"It is not what we wanted. We are clearly on one end of the scale to some of the other entrants who would prefer more freedom, but we recognise others that may not have the resources to do that or have slightly different objectives.

"So we are not singing and dancing saying what a wonderful agreement it is. But yes, it is something in the greatest interest we will work with."