Reports have surfaced that the Minardi F1 team may not be able to compete in Sunday's Australian Grand Prix after failing to gain support from all nine teams to race its 2004-spec car on Sunday.

Reports have surfaced that the Minardi F1 team may not be able to compete in Sunday's Australian Grand Prix after failing to gain support from all nine teams to race its 2004-spec car on Sunday.

At the end of last season, Minardi's head, Paul Stoddart, said that he would be fielding his team's 2004 cars in the season's opening races since it did not have the resources to have the car ready by the Australian race.

However, while eight of the nine teams have agreed to allow Minardi to race with a car that does not necessarily comply with all the technical regulations, Ferrari have said that it would leave it to the FIA to determine whether the car is legal," reported.

The teams are clearly embroiled in a political matter since Ferrari, incidentally, is the only team to have agreed to a new post-2007 Concorde Agreement, and this decision weighs heavily on the future of the sport.

While Stoddart said that he had spoken to Ferrari head Jean Todt about the situation, Todt had not shown any support. And although there has been talk of Minardi officially appealing, Stoddart has given the assurance that this won't happen before the race.

"As a last resort, and I mean last resort, there is always the option of the High Court to challenge the legality of the regulations," Stoddart said. "But on this, the tenth anniversary of the Melbourne Grand Prix, I would not want to be the one to spoil the party."

Original article from Car