The news was reported by Germany's Auto Motor und Sport magazine, whose online edition suggested that organizational problems have made the jointly launch impossible.
Initially, the members of the FOTA announced officially that all teams agreed to launch their cars at the same time, in order to tackle the economic difficulties in the sport. The place for that event was to be Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias (City of the Arts and Sciences) complex, with the launches to take place in the last day of January (one day before the first official test of the off-season, at the Ricardo Tormo circuit).
That would have ensured the payment of only 150,000 euros per team for their car's launch, as the entire event was believed to cost around 2M euro.
However, it seems like it was a multitude of reasons to stop that idea from being fully implemented, not only logistic ones. First of all, the smaller teams feared that the media would focus mostly on the championship's big guns and their own car launch would remain uncovered by the reporters. Secondly, not all teams seem to have their car ready for that date.
The newly entrants – US F1, Campos Grand Prix, Lotus F1 Racing and Virgin Racing – are barely in their crash-test phase in the development of their cars, which means they will probably wait until mid-to-late February to see their challengers on track.
In exchange, all teams will switch to individual launch events, based on low-budget schemes.
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