Prodrive boss David Richards has been busily denying that his purchase of Aston Martin has anything to do with his fledgling F1 team.

“There’s a long way to go before an involvement in F1 could benefit the Aston Martin brand,” Richards told the BBC. “Our route to be competitive in F1 is to partner an existing team, I don’t have the patience to set up a team from scratch and flog around at the back of the grid for five years.”

“As far as Aston Martin is concerned, it’s a product that is still in its infancy,” he added.

We shall see…

Rookie Renger van der Zande will make his A1GP debut for Team Netherlands in Mexico City. Emulating Team France’s strategy at the final race of last season, the team will run van der Zande in qualifying and the sprint race, before regular driver Jeroen Bleekemolen takes over for the feature race.

“We want to present the opportunity to talented drivers to show themselves on this level in front of a large international racing audience and simultaneously give their commercial support team an extra tool to get the business community involved,” said team boss Jan Lammers.

“It would be the easiest thing, now that Jeroen is performing very well, to leave things unchanged. But, we cannot ignore the importance of the development of the team as a whole.

The team will then alternate the two drivers for the final two races of the season. Let’s hope van der Zande and Bleekemolen are a similar height - because that issue caused a fair few problems for Team France when they tried car-sharing…

The Champ Car Series has postponed the introduction of standing starts for at least the first three rounds of the 2007 series, after some drivers had difficulty adapting to the new system in pre-season testing.

“Safety is our concern and we feel we need to fine-tune our standing-start process before we implement it,” said Champ Car’s vice-president of operations Tony Cotman.

“We will continue to work with the teams and the manufacturers to find the safest and most reliable option for the standing-start process with an eye toward using them at Portland (in June) if possible.”

The series will revert to traditional rolling starts in the meantime.