Mercedes will make customer engines available in 2004

Mercedes sports boss Norbert Haug said no decision had yet been taken on which team would use them.

"We need to put all the effort behind it, to supply an additional team, and that [one team] is the maximum. Everything else would compromise our own efforts and we cannot afford that," said Haug.

"We were approached by more than one team but we did not go into the details so far. This will happen within, I would say, the next six weeks."

The BBC understands that Jordan are the favourites to buy the engines. Jordan boss Eddie Jordan said only that he was in the first season of a three-year deal with Ford to use their customer motors.

Haug said McLaren, of whom Mercedes own 40%, would remain the only team with a Mercedes-branded engine.

We have worked together with Ferrari for seven years but of course we have to look for other possibilities Peter Sauber F1 team boss

Any other deal would involve a different name, either artificial or similar to Sauber's arrangement in using Ferrari engines relabelled as Petronas after their Malaysian oil company sponsor.

Sauber, Minardi and Jordan are the three non-manufacturer teams in F1 with the latter two both using Ford Cosworth engines this year.

The engine rules change next year, when each must be built to last an entire race weekend, and manufacturers have agreed to make them available to the smaller teams at an affordable price.

Peter Sauber said his team were generally happy with their current arrangement with Ferrari.

"We have worked together for seven years but of course we have to look for other possibilities but at the moment there is only one - Mercedes," he said.