Making good use of an analogy involving one of the classic whodunits, Ferrari is under no illusion as to who is to blame for the departure of Toyota and others.

A brief comment issued by the Maranello outfit in the wake of today's announcement by Toyota reads as follows:

"It seems like a parody of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians", published in England for the first time in the year 1939, but the reality is much more serious.

Formula 1 continues loosing important names: over the last 12 months Honda, BMW, Bridgestone and this morning Toyota announced their retirements. In exchange - if one could call it that - Manor, Lotus (because of the team of Colin Chapman, Jim Clark and Ayrton Senna, to name a few, there is hardly more than the name), USF1 and Campos Meta have arrived.

You might say "same-same", because it is enough if there are participants. But that's not entirely true and then we've got to see if next year there will really be as many in Bahrain for the first race of the 2010 season and how many will actually make it to the end of the year.

In reality the steady trickle of desertion is more the result of a war against the big car manufacturers by those who managed the sport, than the effects of the economical that affected Formula 1 over the last years.

In Christie's detective novel the guilty person is only discovered when everybody else is dead, one after the other. Do we want to wait until this happens or should we write Formula 1's book with a different closing chapter?"