With the 2010 season approaching, it’s quite marked how much more we know about British Superbikes than the British Touring Car Championship.

There’s a very significant similarity though: both have lost a top team. Due to a lack of sponsorship to replace Airwaves, GSE Racing won’t be competing in BSB; and Vaxhall pulled VX Racing out of the BTCC last year.

Glance at the 2010 BSB grid and it’s a virtually complete picture. In a relatively last minute change, Hydrex Honda has become Swan Honda, but otherwise it’s familiar teams: HM Plant Honda, Worx Crescent Suzuki, Motorpoint Yamaha, MSS Colchester Kawasaki, Relentless Suziki by TAS, Buildbase Kawasaki. Plus Michael Rutter returning with RidersMotorcycles.com Ducati, and a good smattering of other entries. All with confirmed riders.

It’s a less certain world over in the BTCC. It should all become clear on 23rd March, when the annual media day is held, this year at Brands Hatch. Until then, we have to rely on Wikipedia to keep track of the grid.

Sunshine.co.uk with Tech-Speed is the only one of last year’s teams to be fully formed, while Team Aon and WSR both have one driver confirmed. David Pinkney and Andrew Jordan have each gone out on their own. There are new teams: Forster Motorsport with a couple of Mat Jackson’s old BMWs; AmD with a pair of VW Golfs. Tom Boardman returns to the BTCC from the WTCC with the SEAT Leon; Bamboo Engineering have gone the other way, and taken Harry Vaulkhard with them.

So it’s by no means an empty grid at this point, but there are lots of missing pieces. Both Team Dynamics and Motorbase have been testing, running Matt Neal and Robert Collard respectively, so they seem like announcements to come. Colin Turkington has been busy for WSR too, so perhaps we’ll see him confirmed before long.

What of the other big name drivers? James Thompson is already looking busy, tackling the DTC (Danish), STCC (Scandanavian), ETCC (European Touring Car Cup), and a bit of WTCC. There could yet be a splash of BTCC on the side too.

Jason Plato is the interesting one though: he’s made a rare appearance on Twitter today, alerting us to announcements to come in the next few days. What announcements? Well, RML running the Chevrolet Cruze seems likely, given that it was announced and unannounced on Twitter earlier this month.

But there’s also Triple Eight, the team behind VX Racing, which is hoping to be back. Fabrizio Giovanardi, perhaps? Who knows. Certainly not me.

I’ve confused myself just writing this. And that’s without getting into sponsorship: Team Dynamics has a Honda tie-in, but WSR has lost RAC, and Motorbase has lost Airwaves. Again, BSB seems to have fared better, for reasons beyond me.

Roll on the first race of the season, when I can stop trying to juggle all this in my head.