The team expected to be challenging for third place in the constructors' championship this season, and lead driver Jacques Villeneuve even claimed he thought they could win the odd race. Both have been exposed as wishful thinking.

It is one thing to quickly make up ground on the likes of Arrows, Sauber, Prost and even Jordan. It is quite another to catch up with McLaren and Ferrari, teams with vastly greater resources and experience than BAR can even dream about this year.

Thus far, BAR have failed.

More worryingly for their long-term future, they were outpaced by arch-rivals Jordan, who use the same Honda engine.

Neither team has impressed greatly, and the reliability of both has proved pretty poor, but Jordan has proved at least to have a quicker car.

In BAR's favour, they managed to finish ahead of Jordan in the constructors' championship - but only after Jarno Trulli was disqualified from a race for a technical infringement.

For BAR, this lack of performance is a major problem, for their contract with Honda runs out at the end of next season, and on current performance there seems little reason for the Japanese company to stick with them.

Jacques Villeneuve, a champion in 1997 with Williams, has invested the last three years of his career in the team when he could have stayed where he was or, if he had played his cards right, perhaps even gone to McLaren.

Now, though, not only is Villeneuve's car not very good, but he is being matched step-for-step by the under-rated Olivier Panis.

It's not that Panis is not good - he is, very - but it rather undermines the claims of Villeneuve's team boss Craig Pollock that the Canadian would be a match for Michael Schumacher in equal cars.