With days to go to the start of the Formula One season, Minardi boss Paul Stoddart is accusing Ferrari of trying to bully his struggling team out of the Australian Grand Prix.
Ferrari, constructors' title winner for the last six seasons, is the only team which hasn't voted in favor of giving the Minardi cars an exemption for technical regulations introduced for the season.
Minardi needs all nine of its rival teams to consent to the exemption before it can compete at Albert Park on Sunday.
Stoddart said Ferrari general director Jean Todt was refusing to cooperate.
"Todt has refused point blank, to me in a telephone call," Stoddart told The AP on Wednesday. "I'm under no illusions, it's politically motivated.
"There's no sporting issue here, there never has been. We're not a realistic threat to Ferrari. Todt knows that I need that signature and he's told me we won't be getting it."
Todt isn't scheduled to arrive in Australia until Friday, seemingly dooming Minardi's cars to fail scrutineering on Thursday afternoon.
However, Stoddart said he'd been told his cars should satisfy scrutineers in terms of safety regulations and should be eligible to race, unless a rival team lodges protests.
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that ... we won't know until five minutes before practice I suppose," he said.
Stoddart drove some laps of Melbourne's downtown streets in one of his racers earlier Wednesday, fearing at the time that was as close as his cars might come to competing in Australia.
The Australian millionaire said he'd discounted taking legal action to ensure Minardi races because he doesn't want the issue to overshadow the 10th anniversary of the Grand Prix in Melbourne.
If Ferrari insists on Minardi conforming to 2005 technical regulations and continues to try and block it from racing on Sunday, "we'll be looking at what options we do have," Stoddart said.
"We could attempt to modify the car to make it conform, but that would be enormous," he said.
"And that would mean the car would be racing untested."
Stoddart said he was confident the Minardis would make it to the starting grid. But if they weren't allowed, "the ramifications would be far reaching and long remembered."
"F1 does have problems at the moment, and this is not going to help it -- it could lead to a split.
"The real issue is not Minardi, forget that ... I'm the fall guy. The real issue is about the future of F1."
The start of the F1 season has been overshadowed by the mounting threat of a breakaway series by rival Grand Prix World Championship -- a holding company founded by major F1 carmakers BMW, Mercedes and Renault -- beginning in 2008.
An agreement between F1 teams, commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone and the auto racing governing body FIA expires following the 2007 season.
Hoping to head off GPWC, Ecclestone got Ferrari to sign up through 2012, but the other nine teams have balked at following, angry at special treatment for the Italian team.
Last month, GPWC met with the so-called "Group of Nine" -- the F1 teams excluding Ferrari -- and most seemed open to the idea of ousting Ecclestone and having GPWC run the sport or set up a rival series.
Stoddart said Todt was making him pay for being spokesman for the "Group of Nine."
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