Alexander Rossi will not race in Belgium after all.

"This is just a reflection of how the industry has to work sometimes."

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It looked like it would be the best week end of Alexander Rossi's career, He was going to take the green flag, at Spa of all places, the same place where Michael Schumacher made his debut, the first American to do so in seven seasons... but it's not going to happen.


Max Chilton wrote the check after all and that's that.
From Andrew Benson's BBC column

" Marussia said on Thursday that Chilton, 23, would be replaced for the weekend by reserve driver Alexander Rossi as a result of "contractual issues".  The team refused to give details but on Friday morning Marussia said Briton Chilton would be racing in Spa.
Marussia chief executive officer Graeme Lowdon suggested the issue had been related to financial payments.  Lowdon said: "I can't go into too much detail on the individual instances but we are running an F1 team here.
"There are a large number of commercial agreements that are involved and sometimes it just happens we reach a stage where for contractual reasons it's not appropriate for a driver to be in the car and we took that action.
"These things happen. It's the drivers' jobs to be flexible. Both Max and Alex are professional drivers who will take this in their stride."

Or maybe Marussia just got a bit of free attention after watching Caterham get in the news with Lotterer taking Kobayashi's team.

Both Marussia and Caterham were about six seconds off the pace after the first practice session

Pos Driver               Team                  Time       Gap     Laps
 1. Nico Rosberg         Mercedes              1m51.577s           25 
 2. Lewis Hamilton       Mercedes              1m51.674s  +0.097s  24 
 3. Fernando Alonso      Ferrari               1m51.805s  +0.228s  16 
 4. Jenson Button        McLaren-Mercedes      1m52.404s  +0.827s  21 
 5. Kimi Raikkonen       Ferrari               1m52.818s  +1.241s  17 
 6. Sergio Perez         Force India-Mercedes  1m52.903s  +1.326s  24 
 7. Kevin Magnussen      McLaren-Mercedes      1m52.922s  +1.345s  23 
 8. Nico Hulkenberg      Force India-Mercedes  1m52.937s  +1.360s  22 
 9. Daniel Ricciardo     Red Bull-Renault      1m52.972s  +1.395s  19 
10. Valtteri Bottas      Williams-Mercedes     1m53.172s  +1.595s  20 
11. Sebastian Vettel     Red Bull-Renault      1m53.369s  +1.792s  11 
12. Daniil Kvyat         Toro Rosso-Renault    1m53.594s  +2.017s  21 
13. Romain Grosjean      Lotus-Renault         1m53.597s  +2.020s  20 
14. Adrian Sutil         Sauber-Ferrari        1m53.703s  +2.126s  14 
15. Felipe Massa         Williams-Mercedes     1m53.968s  +2.391s  20 
16. Jean-Eric Vergne     Toro Rosso-Renault    1m54.189s  +2.612s  20 
17. Giedo van der Garde  Sauber-Ferrari        1m54.335s  +2.758s  16 
18. Pastor Maldonado     Lotus-Renault         1m55.336s  +3.759s  21 
19. Jules Bianchi        Marussia-Ferrari      1m55.782s  +4.205s  19 
20. Alexander Rossi      Marussia-Ferrari      1m57.232s  +5.655s  20 
21. Andre Lotterer       Caterham-Renault      1m57.886s  +6.309s  24 
22. Marcus Ericsson      Caterham-Renault      1m57.977s  +6.400s  24 

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