Mark Webber experienced a front wing failure in practice yesterday morning, which was followed by another front wing failure, this time on Alex Yoong's car, during qualifying.

The team withdrew the design of the wing that failed on Webber's car and announced their intention to continue despite Yoong's problem, as it was felt that the wing had been ripped from the car after the Malaysian impacted heavily with kerbing on the outside of Turn 13.

Today, however, Webber's rear wing failed whilst he was travelling at speed down the pit straight in warm-up putting him into a violent spin that saw the Australian end up in the gravel by Turn One. The FIA immediately went to the Minardi motorhome while investigations were carried out as to what had caused the wing to disintegrate.

Yesterday engineers had flown back to Minardi's Italian factory in Stoddart's aircraft to work on the front wing problem throughout the night, before returning to Spain this morning. However, the team does not have the necessary time to address this new problem.

At 11.00 local time in Barcelona, Stoddart announced that Minardi would withdraw from the event. He said: "This is the toughest decision a team owner has ever to make and we are withdrawing our cars from the race.

"We were confident about what we had done with yesterday's incidents, as in the front wing failures. The front wing incident with Alex is not related to that of Mark. Alex's case was an accident. We have done what we could to strengthen the part (which failed on Mark's car) but today we have no option but to withdraw the cars.

"Technically we can race our cars, but it would be totally irresponsible of me to put those cars in the race. Had it happened yesterday, we would have been able to do something about it, the only thing we don't have at the moment is time. What we are going to do now is take the parts back to the factory and totally analyse the parts.

"The part that failed was a brand new part, freshly manufactured. It has gone through all the stress tests and we had used that element last year in all 17 races and never had any failure. What happened was that the actual failure was along the stress line of that element, so we just have to investigate and analyse exactly what has happened.

"We have tested the piece, we have raced it, it has been stress tested and we have never had a failure before. I feel very sad for Mark and Alex, but I believe this is the right thing to do."

Stoddart was unable to say if this would effect the team at the next race in Austria, saying that they had to undertake a thorough investigation into the problems encountered in Barcelona.