The south coast club, who entered administration last month in a bid to avoid being wound up over mounting debts, face an uncertain future, and Stefanovic has claimed that his team is ready to step in at a moment’s notice, should Portsmouth no longer be able to play.

Ready: New football club boss Zoran Stefanovic

It is believed that Stefanovic is attempting to purchase a stadium and training facilities from Chester City, who were recently expelled from the Conference and wound up following their own financial meltdown, and then enter the Premiership as soon as possible. “We are confident that Premiership glory awaits to cover us in the soonness of time,” Stefan FC said in a statement that looked like it had been written by a combination of Google Translate and Flavio Briatore. “If foolish blue team cannot play football then glorious Serbians will do it for them. It is the only option.”

Stefan FC’s grand scheme, however, is not expected to be sanctioned by the English Football Association, who commented: “We already have a set of procedures for vetting new entrants to the Premiership – it’s called the Football League,” a spokesman said. “If Stefan FC want to play in the Premier League they will have to pass over the same hurdles as everybody else.”

Stefanovic was said to be unconcerned by the FA’s comments, and has vowed to start bringing a coachload of players to a Premier League game every weekend until they allow his team to play.

Recalled: Defective Toyota model, the Prius

Recently the company was forced to recall eight million units due to problems with the throttle being stuck open; now it is reported that their hybrid model, the Prius, is plagued with braking issues.

“We are amazed that the company is having such problems,” former technical director Mike Gascoyne, now working for Lotus, told reporters. “When we were working there, the major problem was that the throttle seemed to work too slowly, and the brakes were if anything too good – the cars were just slow everywhere.”

Though problems within the team, concerning acceleration and braking issues, were largely kept quiet, they did occasionally rise to public attention – such as in the last race of 2008, when Timo Glock completely failed to accelerate around the final corner.

“If anything this is an absolute reversal of the issues we were used to dealing with when we were still employed at Toyota,” Gascoyne, who left the team in 2006. His sentiments were confirmed by numerous other team members, most of whom were made redundant when the team withdrew from F1 at the end of 2009.

Most of the former Toyota team assets have been bought up by n0nexistent Serbian outfit Stefan GP, who hope to use them to give Ralf Schumacher the illusion that he is doing something useful in 2010. Whether the new team will continue “The Toyota Way” of promising much and delivering surprisingly little remains to be seen, though with Schumacher at the wheel, it seems likely.

Historic: F1 nobodies Stefan GP, and Toyota

Stefan GP’s original application to join the 2010 F1 world championship was turned down – their initial reaction to this was to start a lawsuit, before dropping the case, going ahead and assembling an F1 car anyway. Their new car, based on the cancelled 2010 Toyota project, has been shoved into a container and shipped over to Bahrain for the opening race of the new season, despite the fact that the team has failed to secure an entry into the world championship.

“Simple letters of rejection and repeated insistences that we do not belong in Formula One are not enough to deter us!” team principal Zoran Stefanovic claimed in a badly-worded press statement today. “We have commenced operationings to transport car to Bahrain, where we will race, pending agreement of Formula One Management and the FIA, of course.”

“This is clearly a world record,” a Guinness World Records spokesman stated earlier. “For nearly seven months Stefan GP have been unable to accept the fact that their application to enter F1 in 2010 has been rejected. Nobody else has ever managed such a feat without becoming demoralised, giving up and racing in the Serbian National Tin Bath-Rolling Championships or wherever it was that they came from.”

In keeping with the team’s ethos of steely determination against all observable reality, Takuma Sato and Christian Klien are expected to be named as the team’s race drivers if they are, by some miracle, actually allowed anywhere near the Bahrain paddock later in the month.

Unmasked: The (allegedly) real Zoran Stefanovic

The Serbian, whose government is supporting his “Stefan Grand Prix” effort, has been linked in recent days with a buyout of the withdrawing Toyota team, and admitted that his outfit were still intent on getting onto the Formula One grid in 2010. However, he denied the “scurrilous rumours” linking him to disgraced ex-F1 figure Briatore.

Conspiracy theories emerged this week, with proponents pointing out a number of “discrepancies” indicating that “Stefanovic” could simply be a ploy by Briatore to work his way back into F1’s inner circle, after he was handed a lifetime ban by the FIA in September.

“Firstly, Mr. Briatore and Mr. Stefanovic both have murky business histories, where they somehow made a fortune in a way that is not at all clear,” one leading proponent of the theory pointed out on an Internet forum yesterday. “Secondly, both have a history of failing to curry favour with the FIA,” referring to Stefanovic’s lawsuit against the governing body for their selection process when compiling the 2010 entry list, and Briatore’s belief that he could instruct drivers to deliberately crash their cars and get away with it.

“Thirdly, and this is very important, why do you never see Mr. Briatore and Mr. Stefanovic in the same room? The only explanation is that they are the same person,” the theorist continued. The alternative possibility, that Briatore and Stefanovic have simply never met, was dismissed as “unworkable.”

Stefanovic, however, was scathing about the rumours, suggesting they were “imperialist lies disseminated to prevent full glory from reaching great nation of Serbia and Stefan Grand Prix. Min.”

Misquoted: Team principal Ross Brawn

Brawn was widely quoted earlier this week as being confident that Button would stay at the team, although the two parties have been deadlocked in recent weeks over the matter of the new world champion’s salary.

“Unfortunately my words have been taken entirely out of context,” Brawn said in a hastily arranged news conference today. “I have no idea whether Jenson will stay or go. He’s refusing to speak to us after we told him to stop adding zeroes onto all the numbers in his contract.

“When I said I was 99% sure Button would stay, I was talking about this button on my jacket,” Brawn said, showing his coat to the assembled journalists. “It was only hanging on by a single thread, and I was a bit worried it would fall off before I could get home and ask the wife to sew it back on again.”

Reports suggest that Brawn did indeed get home with the errant button intact, and it has since been secured to its rightful place.

Brawn refused to comment on reports that Button had been seen touring McLaren’s Woking factory, fuelling speculation that the champion could make a switch to that team for 2010. “That’s Jenson, of course,” Brawn helpfully added. “I can say with reasonable certainty that this button isn’t going to McLaren. Unless the bastards try to steal it and photocopy it again.”