Toro Rosso dreams and realities.

Scuderia Toro Rosso are in the process of deciding who their drivers are for 2009 and will be testing a bunch of them in the coming weeks. The most obvious two contenders are Sebastien Bourdais, who raced for the team this year to mixed results and up and coming Swiss driver Sebastien Buemi, but apparantly Gerhard Berger has contacted other drivers as well. Takuma Sato is the most notable of these drivers contacted to actually accept the offer after his old job at Super Aguri collapsed under a pile of non-paid sponsor obligations and could be a good fit, while the names of Bruno Senna and Rubens Barichello have been thrown into the mix, depending on which one Honda choses. One name that was apparantly contacted may surprise many is the name of Juan-Pablo Montoya.

JPM had a pretty good F1 career with Williams and McLaren before falling out with Ron Dennis and taking his toys and going to NASCAR, where he has wasted little time in criticizing F1 whenever possible. He has called F1 boring and he is much happier in NASCAR, depsite being a race winner in F1 and a midfielder in NASCAR. This it seems quite unrealistic that he would ever accept to return to Formula One with a midfield team and it seems surprising that anyone in F1 would actually want him, given that he had seemingly nuked the hell out of all bridges back to this class of motorsports. While one might praise Gerhard Berger and Franz Tost for their optimism of landing a big name like Montoya, one can't help but feel that it is just a lame attempt at scoring some cheap publicity in Latin America for Red Bull with the idea of seeing JPM in a Red Bull sponsored car as they must have known that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell Montoya would agree to enter a shootout for a seat with an average team. Juan Pablo rather unpolitely said no thanks to the offer of a test and will continue to do waht he does in NASCAR and complain and moan the way he did in F1. I for one am not disappointed to hear that he won't be back as he is nothing more than a big (figuratively and more recently, literally) whiner.