Between botched sales and Jules Bianchi's terrible accident, this has been a terrible few months for the small teams at the back of the Formula One grid. And now it just got worse: Marussia has fired all 200 of its staff and has essentially gone out of business.
The report in The Telegraph says that the beleaguered F1 team has been scrambling frantically to find funding in the last few weeks to allow them to continue, but it just didn't come to fruition. The staff hasn't been paid in a month and they're behind on almost all of their payments.
Marussia did submit an entry for the 2015 championship just the other day, but it was in the hopes that they'd be able to come up with the entry fee in the next few weeks. It has now become clear that will definitely not be happening.
The next question is what will happen to Caterham F1, which has been at the center of a botched sale and is now also in administration. Caterham and Marussia both entered F1 in 2010 with promises that costs would be capped and a team with less funding would still be competitive.
But that never actually happened, and as costs of a competitive organization continued to stay at stratospheric levels, Caterham and Marussia never really stood a chance to be up front, let alone consistently score points.
In fact, Marussia scored their first points this year with Jules Bianchi, so the team closing is just another sad development in a terrible year for the team.