Colin Kolles will reportedly step down as Hispania Racing team boss as part of a management reshuffle.

Just hours after the team dropped Narain Karthikeyan in favour of Red Bull junior driver Daniel Ricciardo, Autosport claims there could be even more changes at Hispania Racing.

According to the website, Kolles is 'poised to step aside to allow the owning Carabante family to take more direct control.'

Kolles joined Hispania Racing at the start of 2010 when Jose Ramon Carabante bought the fledgling F1 team from Adrian Campos.

And now, a year and a half later, Carabante is keen to take over the running of the team with either himself or his son Jose taking the role of team boss.

Autosport claims that Kolles will stay on in some capacity during the transition phase but could then move on to Williams in 2012 as part of the latter's new management structure.

HRT is an odd Formula 1 team. It always has been. Originally it was to be called Campos Meta 1 but Adrian Campos came down with a nasty case of mañana and somehow never quite got round to creating a proper F1 team, despite having won one of the much-prized entries in 2009. With time running out, one of his investors, property baron Jose Ramon Carabante, leapt into the breach, as much as a portly Spanish gentleman of a certain age can do so. With Mr Ecclestone nudging him in the direction of Colin Kolles, a team was scrambled together at the start of the 2010 season, using Dallara-built chassis and Cosworth engines. It was a fabulous piece of conjuring and ought to have earned Kolles the title of Fireman of the Year (right, as seen by GP+, in an article earlier this year entitled “The Accidental Team Owner”), even if perhaps he would have missed out on being included in the average Hunky Firefighter calendar. The result of all this was that Kolles quickly dispensed with the Dallara deal and built a team in Germany, based around his Team Kolles operation, which is headquartered in Greding, a small town in Bavaria. This operation has been in action since 2000 when Kolles first began entering cars in Formula 3. He went on to run cars in DTM and more recently Audis in the Le Mans Series. He owns all the HRT equipment and has all the major team members under contract. Thus the office in Madrid from which the Carabante Family operates in effect rents the F1 team from Kolles. The longterm plan of the Carabantes may be to build a team headquarters in Spain, but the organisation does not really have the luxury of longterm planning as the order of the day since the beginning has been to survive. The news that Kolles is going to step aside and let the Carabantes run the team leaves any number of questions to be answered.

Jose Ramon Carabante is understood to want his son Jose to be team principal, which is fine. A rich man’s son needs employment to keep him out of trouble, but if the two organisations are to separate from one another it is not going to be easy for the Carabantes to build a completely new operation of their own, although logically they have to do this to give the team any real value. They could buy Kolles’s equipment from him, but he is unlikely to want to sell the team he has spent many years building up. Having said Kolles would love to be a team owner in this own right but he needs to raise the money to acquire an entry from one of the existing 12 team owners. He would then have two factories, which is somewhat surplus to requirements. Oddly enough, the logical thing to do if he can find the backing to buy another team, would be to sell the extra factory to… the Carabantes, although their desire to have an operation based in Spain rather torpedoes that idea. The only F1-scale facility in Spain at the moment is to be found up in the Basque country, where Joan Villadelprat is waiting for the right opportunity to launch Epsilon Euskadi into F1. The problem with this is that the Carabantes want their team based in Murcia, which is 500 miles south of the Epsilon Euskadi headquarters.

The alternative for Kolles would be to sell the entire operation to the Carabantes. They could move it to Spain and Kolles could use the money to buy another team. The only thing needed to achieve this is money… and the Carabantes have been rather short of that.

Kolles has been tipped as a possible recruit for Williams, but he says that these stories are “complete rubbish”.

One might conclude that the two parties are stuck together if neither one can afford to buy out the other, but the problem with that theory is that they cannot go on borrowing money forever as the bank might at some point want to see some money back. The bank might decided that it would do a better job running the team and take control of the company that has been borrowing the money, in which case the log jam might be broken if they came up with a partnership deal which gave Kolles a chance to one day take over the team, and the bank the chance to get its money back. The option is to play double or quits and pour more money into creating a real Spanish team…

The owner of Hispania Racing, José Ramón Carabante, sold his team to the Japanese investment bank Nomura on Friday. According to AS, the deal is worth €24 million.

Official confirmation is expected next Monday, July 4. The team is assumed to continue operating under the same name at least in the near future.

The HRT Formula 1 team is reported to have been sold to Japan’s merchant bank Nomura by the Banco Popular, which controls the shares of the operation, which were pledged by Jose Ramon Carabante when he borrowed the money to run the team. The news has been confirmed by several sources and is believed to involve around $35 million. It remains to be seen what happens next in terms of the day-to-day running of the business but the bank is unlikely to be too keen on leaving things in the hands of the Carabantes. The news is expected to be confirmed on Monday.