Mondayish news and rumour roundup, July 15

Sorry for posting a day late readers, I am sure that both of you are disappointed. Here is my roundup of news and rumours from the past eight days.

I will start with the most important piece of news, that is that of the return of a legend to the cockpit of a race car. I am talking of course of the one and only Sakon Yamamoto, who will replace Luca Filippi at the ART GP2 team. Yamamoto will bring a small fortune of experience to the team to replace the rather lackluster Filippi, who is a Honda F1 test driver as well. We will see how this pans out for Super Sakon, but one hopes it will be a springboard for a return to F1.

In other news Paul Tracy's comeback to IndyCars is confirmed with the announcement that he will run a Subway sponsored car for the Grand Prix of Edmonton in two weeks time. His car will be owned by Tony George's Vision racing program but Run by Derrick Walker with a view to run more races. What is more significant is that the car is sponsored by Subway, a huge corporation who may be convinced to up their sponsorship to allow Paul to run the rest of the season. Paul is a great character and someone that the IRL needs for PR purposes, even if he is washed up and accident prone.

Elsewhere fellow canuck Alex Tagliani appears to be on the verge of joining Conquest racing to replace Enrique Bernoldi. Conquest team owner Eric Bachelart is said to be unhappy with Bernoldi's performance and attitude and maybe the Ex-Arrows man has let the fact that he was once an F1 driver get to his head.

Gerry Forsythe is returning to open wheel racing as a team owner with the announcement that he will be running an Indy Lights team (the IRL equivalent of GP2) starting in 2009. This could be good news for the series as it may be seen as the start of an Indy Car team sometime down the road.

In F1 the future of the Honda driver lineup remains ever in doubt as Ross Brawn has been blatantly trying to avoid the issue recently, allowing the regular rumour mongers to have a field day trying to tell us who may not have their contract renewed. Rubens Barichello has been surprisingly quick all season while Jenson Button has been decidedly crap. At the start of the season it was assumed that RUbens would be out and Jenson the main man at Honda, but this season has clouded that.

ADDED JULY 16

Sarah Fisher racing has found a sponsor for two races this year, and that sponsor is Dollar General Stores, an American chain of Cheap-stuff stores with over 8,000 outlets across the US. This is great news as everyone's favourite hard working owner-driver (I do not consider Marty Roth hard working or a driver) will definetly be able to race in two races this year, Kentucky and Chicagoland, and she may be able to line them up as a sponsor to run the whole season next year. This is great news for her and for the IRL as the series continues to bring in big name sponsors like Subway and Dollar General. Sarah Fisher is a great ambassador for the sport and an inspirational story of hard work paying off.

Stay tuned for more news and rumours here as preparations get underway for the German Grand Prix and for the Indycar race at Mid-Ohio.