Available: 2 F1 seats. Problem: no-one to fill them

It’s not often you can say this, but there are a couple of great drives available for next year, but no outstanding young talent to fill them

There’s a seat going at Honda and one at Toro Rosso, but a glance across the ranks of the GP2 field , at the US scene and across the other ranks below F1 yields little. It’s intensely frustrating for the team bosses. They’d love to give a talented 22 year old a try next year, especially Honda, but it’s slim pickings.

I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised; we’ve seen the arrival of three real gems recently in Hamilton, Kubica and Vettel, but it is still surprising to me that there is no-one coming up behind them who demands attention. If there were, as the teams have admitted to me, they would slide effortlessly into a seat next year. So who's out there? [ more ]

Toro Rosso will probably give Sebastien Buemi the seat next year and he’s been driving the safety car lately to ‘learn’ the flyway circuits at the end of the season. He’s okay, but not another Vettel. Honda will test Bruno Senna and Luca Filippi soon. There is Lucas di Grassi and Romain Grosjean, both of whom are tied to Renault. I’ve watched GP2 closely and Di Grassi and Senna both look a couple of tenths too slow for F1, although Di Grassi is very consistent and apparently very strong on the engineering side. Grosjean and Filippi don’t seem very polished or consistent.

The success of Vettel has caused McLaren and Mercedes to realise that they may have made a mistake by shunting Paul di Resta, who beat Vettel in F3, into touring cars. He’s still young and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get back in a single seater next year and maybe into F1 the year after if all goes well.

But we have a dearth of ready talent right now. I’m told there are some exciting drivers coming through behind, especially a 19 year old lad called Jules Bianchi, who is managed by Nicholas Todt. He was pure class in a kart and although it’s early days according to my friends here in F1 who talent spot, he looks the business in single seaters, so watch out for him in a few years time.