Spyker tight-lipped on arbitration.

The Spyker F1 team insists it cannot comment on the latest stage in its legal procedure against what it believes is the use of 'customer cars' in Formula One, short of confirming that a formal protest has been lodged against Super Aguri F1 and Scuderia Toro Rosso.

Frustrated in its efforts to gain a ruling against its two rivals at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix last weekend, when stewards declared that they could not intervene as the protest was lodged too long after scrutineering, Spyker has moved the action on to the Chamber of Commerce in Lausanne in an effort to settle the matter once and for all.

"The situation is that we had a meeting with the scrutineers and they basically confirmed to us that it is not a matter of the FIA, it is a matter of the Concorde Agreement," Team MD Colin Kolles confirmed in Australia, before admitting that he would attempt to take the matter further, probably to the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

Kolles is adamant that both the SA07 and STR02 are clones of cars produced by other teams, thereby contravening the Concorde Agreement clause that all machines have to be designed and built by the teams running them. Super Aguri and Toro Rosso naturally disagree, claiming that the 'intellectual property' for their cars is not owned by another team, both having secured the designs via third-party operations.

Kolles told reporters at Albert Park that the Honda-powered Super Aguri SA07 was essentially last year's Honda 'works' car, while Toro Rosso's STR02 was a clone of the RB3 being run by sister team Red Bull Racing, and insisted that the two teams should not be allowed to score constructors' points as they were not, technically, constructors.

Spyker officials admitted that they could not comment on the matter when contacted by Crash.net, other than to say that the next stage of the proceedings had been started.