Faraday Future has gone through a lot lately. The electric car startup has struggled to get its factory project off the ground, lost executives, and seen its main investor — Chinese conglomerate LeEco — nosedive.

Now, the next victim of FF’s financial woes could be its participation in Formula E. Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation, who spoke with The Verge on condition of anonymity, say that Faraday Future’s involvement with the fledgling, all-electric racing series is on thin ice.

FF joined Formula E last summer, just before the start of the third season. It partnered with Dragon Racing, a team run by Jay Penske, the son of famed race team owner Roger Penske. The company slotted in alongside major auto manufacturers, competing monthly against the likes of Renault, Audi, and Jaguar. Much like them, FF hoped to get back two things from competing in the series: some technical learnings, and some good marketing opportunities.

But with the company scrambling to find new investment money, thanks to the trouble at LeEco (which is also involved in the sponsorship of the race team), Formula E might be one place where the company can save a little bit of cash.

Keith Smout, the commercial director for Dragon Racing, said in an email to The Verge that FF and Dragon have a four-year contract, and that it’s “in good standing.” But he also said the two sides “are discussing season 4 right now.” (Season 3 ended in July.) “Where there is smoke there is fire,” he wrote in a follow-up.

FF was much more upbeat about the relationship. “There have been no business decisions made on whether to pull out [of Formula E],” a spokesperson tells The Verge. The rep added that FF had engineers “on the ground in Spain this [past] weekend” testing for season 4, which starts in December. “On our end, and on Penske’s end as well, the contract is in good standing, and both parties are honoring all their obligations within the contract.”

To be fair, this echoes what Penske said when I asked him about the relationship with FF at the Formula E race in Brooklyn last month:

The response that we’ve had from the team and the Faraday engineering side has been very good. You know, they’ve been active every week with us since really London of last year. So we haven’t seen any change. We’ve had a great working relationship with their team.

But FF is behind on some payments to Penske, according to two sources, which mirrors accusations about how the company at large has not paid some of its suppliers. One high-level person inside Formula E, who asked not to be named, said that Penske is “frantically” looking for a new car company to partner with as the relationship strains behind the scenes.

Part of the problem, another source says, is that FF’s lost some of the people who championed the involvement in motorsports the most. The biggest of those was Marco Mattiacci, who left the company back in December. Mattiacci was the team boss of Ferrari’s Formula One team, in addition to being president and CEO of Ferrari North America and Ferrari Asia Pacific. The Formula E project was “his baby,” the source said.

Nate Schroeder, FF’s head of motorsports, also left the company in July, according to his LinkedIn page. FF has confirmed his departure, but declined to comment further. (Schroder did not respond to multiple inquiries.)

The biggest figure of support left is Nick Sampson, the company’s senior VP of research, who’s also served as the de facto face of FF. “We’ve always wanted to push the limit, that’s part of the culture of Faraday, to push things to the limit to explore where the boundaries are,” Sampson told me last month at the Formula E race in Brooklyn. “Motorsports is a great place for doing that.” 

But Sampson admitted that, while FF feels Formula E (and, recently, Pikes Peak as well) is a good arena for learning more about electric drivetrain technology in high-performance settings, there needs to be a return on that investment. Part of that equation is success in the series — something that eluded Faraday Future Dragon Racing this season, as it finished eighth out of 10 teams. Dragon had finished second and fourth in the first and second seasons, respectively, and so it’s no surprise that Motorsport.com reported this week that “difficulties existed in many areas in general cohesiveness throughout the operation.”

Despite those troubles, Sampson was optimistic. “Like everything in life, you learn more from your mistakes and what goes wrong than your successes,” he said.

FF released a breakdown of the specs of its Formula E car last year that stated a price tag of around $350,000. Each team in the series has four cars, and there are also a dozen or so employees — engineers, mechanics, and communications staffers — that FF pays salaries. Spending in the low millions on Formula E isn’t considered much of a financial risk or burden for most of the manufacturers that are involved. Because it’s so new, the series limits the amount of development that can be done on the cars, so Formula E is a sliver as expensive as other motorsports like F1 or the World Endurance Championship. But most of those manufacturers are global operations with much more money to burn than FF, which only has one startup peer — Chinese company NIO (formerly NextEV) — in the sport.

Getting involved in Formula E might have been a defensible — and potentially even practical — decision for a young, hungry company that appeared to be on the rise. And FF has always had racing ambitions, evidenced by the outrageous (but completely static) supercar that the company unveiled during its first appearance at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show.

FF is a company that, by all accounts, needs to carefully spend every bit of whatever money it can bring in right now. Withdrawing from Formula E could be another huge blow to morale, which is already wearing thin, according to current and former employees. The company has been vocal about its recent efforts to draw in as much as $1 billion in new investment money, too. But considering FF reportedly just used its own headquarters as collateral to secure a recent $14 million “rescue loan” to lease a factory in central California, Formula E might be the easiest corner to cut.

Photography by Sean O’Kane / The Verge