In the early rounds of the 2016 Formula 1 world championship season, it appears that Sauber is clinging to survive and may even have to miss the forthcoming Chinese Grand Prix.
The Swiss team cleared a high hurdle recently after falling behind in February wage payments to its 300 staff, but more problems are now obviously on display.
The F1 paddock is buzzing with speculation that Sauber might reach the end of the road in the next couple of weeks, before making the trip to the Shanghai metropolis.
Team co-owner and boss Monisha Kaltenborn was not even in Bahrain, amid speculation she stayed behind in Hinwil to address Sauber's urgent financial problems.
According to Speed Week, "It is no secret that the fourth-oldest F1 team is in trouble."
"We don't comment on our finances, and I will continue to keep it like this but, referring to the delay [with wages], it was one delay, which was very regrettable from our side," Kaltenborn insisted last week.
"It was just an unfortunate set of circumstances coming together at the time they came together. This should not happen anymore," she added.
Kaltenborn is a fierce critic of the sport's current revenue-distribution model which vastly favours the biggest and most successful teams, "If you try to explain to people out there the kind of income the sport generates – and it has, year by year, gone up if you look at the last few years."
"Yet so many teams are having issues, this can't be right. Something is fundamentally wrong in the sport," she declared.
And that is amid a backdrop of steadily declining sponsorship within the struggling sport, according to a report in the Financial Times.
F1 sponsorship guru Zak Brown agrees: "The costs are, to me, the single largest issue and the one that then drives many of the others.
"We have an industry that is exploding in cost, and collectively they are not able to gather and get those costs under control," he added.
On track things are not much better for the team with Felipe Nasr, the Brazilian driver whose sponsor Banco do Brasil is Sauber's main backer, complaining vociferously throughout the Bahrain weekend about his car.
"This car is terrible to drive!" he exclaimed on team radio and later Nasr summed up Bahrain, "Clearly we have some problems with my car. Now we need to really analyse everything before China."
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