At the weekend, at the South African round of A1GP at Kyalami, series boss Tony Teixeira – a South African himself – was bullish when speaking to South African newspaper The Times. And doubtless the paper chose to pass on his more bullish comments.

“Everything we are is what Formula 1 is trying to be.”

The paper also quotes him as saying that Formula 1 is “like professional wrestling, lacking in credibility”. It’s been widely reported that he some advice for Bernie Ecclestone: “Instead of copying all the ideas from A1GP — just buy me out!”

The amusing point is that Teixeira is very keen on getting into Formula 1. Indeed, speaking to autosport.com this week about his plans to build a motorsport base in Portugal near the Portimao circuit, he said: “it means nothing without F1″.

He looked at buying the teams that have been potentially for sale in recent times, but now looks like setting up his own team. Why?

“The only reason we want an F1 team is for the winners of A1 to go to F1.”

I’m not sure about that logic. It’s implicitly admitting that A1GP is beneath Formula 1. That might be objectively true, but I was under the impression that A1GP was to be seen as a viable alternative to Formula 1.

On the one hand, an A1GP team in Formula 1 might be good advertising for the series itself. But drivers might be less keen to commit to A1GP as a career option if it’s seen by even the series boss as a stepping stone to Formula 1. After all, there’s always the IndyCar Series, which certainly doesn’t see itself like that.

Former British Formula 3 champion and GP2 racer Mike Conway has signed to race in the IndyCar Series for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing. This is a big disappointment in name terms.

Two of the team’s 2008 drivers – the outstandingly named Buddy Rice and Townsend Bell – featured in the Good Name Advent Calendar. By comparison, Mike Conway is a very, very boring name indeed.

On the plus side, it’s a solid mid-pack team, so a good start to Conway’s American racing career. It’s always nice to see Brits doing well over the pond, so hopefully he’ll bring home some decent results.

It’s a year since Jeremy Metcalfe entered Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack as one of the young talented housemates. Then he was a Formula Renault UK driver. With Celebrity Big Brother just getting under way, I thought it about time we checked what he’s been up to since then.

The quick answer is driving in the British GT Championship. Which I imagine to be of similar interest to me as the FIA GT Championship. But that’s not the point.

Metcalfe has been racing a Ferrari 430 for CR Scuderia alongside Luke Hines – a name best known to me for competing in the BTCC a few years ago for VX Racing and SEAT among others. Metcalfe’s website hails the pair as “British GT Vice-Champions” – i.e. they came second in the championship. Which, in all fairness, seems like a pretty good rookie season result.

In other news, Metcalfe has started a degree course at Nottingham Trent University, an institution which I will decline to pass comment on. According to another website, his chosen subject is Property Investment and Finance. You’ll need more than a degree to profitably invest in property at the moment.

There, now you’re up to date. But what will Metcalfe get up to in 2009? Find out here, same time next year! Maybe.

Spin back to the early part of 2006, and you’d hear people talking enthusiastically about Michael Ammermüller as a shoe-in for a drive in one of Red Bull‘s Formula 1 teams in the near future.

But now: he’s nowhere. What happened?

He’d leapt up to GP2 from practically nowhere in 2006, scoring a win in his first weekend. Add a couple more podiums in the first half of the season, as well as further points finishes, and you’ve got a rising star right there. Even more so because he was part of the Red Bull Junior Team.

The second half of his 2006 GP2 season was barren, but nonetheless, when Christian Klien parted company with Red Bull Racing before the last three races of the Formula 1 season, Ammermüller took on the role of third driver with the team. Better than a foot in the door, he had a cheek on the seat.

A test role with Red Bull Racing for 2007 followed; his Formula 1 future was looking rosey. But his 2007 GP2 season started as 2006 had ended, with injury interrupting a string of no results. Ultimately he lost his seat, to be replaced by another Red Bull Junior Team member, Sébastien Buemi. Who, incidentally, is now looking like a shoe-in for a Toro Rosso drive for 2009. What might have been, eh?

Instead, Ammermüller took Sebastian Vettel‘s place in World Series by Renault, when Vettel’s Formula 1 committments became full-time. Ammermüller failed to set the world alight there either. He raced for Germany in A1GP in 2007-08, where he mainly shunted people off, cementing his reputation of being somewhat volatile.

For 2008 he ended up in Formula Master, a relatively new series supporting various WTCC and Formula 1 races, where he finished third in the standings, against pretty unknown competition.

At least his website is realistic, if a little heartbreaking. The news of his move to Formula Master begins thus:

“Former Red Bull Racing test driver Michael Ammermüller has taken another step back in an effort to kick-start his failing pursuit of a Formula One seat.”

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the little guy.

The Macau Grand Prix – now in its 55th year – is a strange event. On the one hand, it’s been going so long, it has to be considered a part of the motorsport furniture. But on the other, no bugger’s knows anything about it. At least, I knew precious little until the WTCC joined the bill three years ago, and it was only looking at the rather unpleasant website – and, yes, Wikipedia – today that I learned much more.

What I did know is that arguably the headline event is the Formula 3 Macau Grand Prix, which has been contested – and won – by some of Formula 1′s most evocative names: Senna and Schumacher to name but two. After British winners for the last two years – Mike Conway and Oliver Jarvis (though he was racing in Japanese Formula 3) – this year it was Japanese driver Keisuke Kunimoto taking victory. And as a result, apparently, the FIA Intercontinental Cup, which I’m sure is a lovely thing.

What I didn’t realise, is that the Macau Motorcycle Grand Prix also forms part of the event – and that really is dominated by Brits. 1997 was the last time another country won it, and Michael Rutter alone was victorious six times between 1998 and 2005. He finished second this year, behind winner Stuart Easton, and ahead of third place John McGuinness – another Brit.

I also didn’t know that the World Touring Car Championship race was previously known as – and still is known as, for that matter – the Guia Race of Macau. It was another good one for Brits, with Andy Priaulx on the podium twice, and Rob Huff taking the second race win.

So there you go: Brits rule in Macau. But not literally: it wasn’t part of the Empire. It was Portugese at one point though.

I’ve not been recording much of Five’s overnight motorsport coverage of late, because frankly I’ve not been getting round to watching much of it. But I will certainly be recording the IndyCar Series highlights in the early hours of Wednesday morning, because that man Justin Wilson only bloody won it. Hooray!

As always, my predictions have been proven remarkably wrong: Robert Doornbos wasn’t alone in suffering reliability problems in the first Superleague Formula race at Donington Park, and didn’t start the second as a result. So he’s not exactly leading the points table.

Davide Rigon for Beijing Guoan is, surprisingly, with a win in the first race, and 6th in the second. He’s done lots in his native Italy, a bit of A1GP, and is racing in the FIA GT Championship – but nothing to really suggest that he should come out on top in a single seater at Donington.

I’m not surprised that Adrián Vallés for Liverpool, and Duncan Tappy for Tottenham Hotspur, follow Rigon in the standings, level on points, having scored a 3rd and a 5th each. Vallés because of his reasonable GP2 career, and Tappy because of his experience of racing in this country – he’s British, of course. Former GP2 racer Borja García for Sevilla sits 4th, having won the second race.

With a good number of drivers with experience of GP2 in the pack, Superleague Formula could prove to be a good opportunity to shine for those with with less international experience – like Duncan Tappy. I’m interested to see how he gets on in the remaining rounds, where he won’t have the advantage of racing on home soil. He has an excellent name, and I enjoyed his Porsche Carrera Cup GB appearance, so I’d like to see him moving up in the motorsport world.

But what impact has Superleague Formula made on the real (online) world? Google News reveals that the Liverpool Daily Post noticed, but otherwise only specialist motorsport sites cared.

It’s a bit rubbish that the BBC and major newspapers haven’t even mentioned it, but I guess coverage can only get better. And for those of us without Setanta Sports, at least YouTube hasn’t entirely let us down.

I’m vaguely obsessed with digging around Superleague Formula at the moment, so I’ve been looking at the websites of the UK clubs involved. Unsurprisingly, there’s nothing about the series prominently on the websites of Liverpool FC, Tottenham Hotspur or Rangers.

However, doing a Google search for any mention of Superleague Formula on those websites – and there are plenty, to be fair – I found links to free tickets for the Donington Park meeting this weekend. So if you’re thinking of going – and you can only get tickets on the door now, by the looks of it – then click on one of these links depending on whether you want to get free tickets from Liverpool, Tottenham or Rangers. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get tickets, but it’s worth a shot – and please do let me know how you get on if you apply.

With the first Superleague Formula race at Donington Park this weekend, things seem to be falling into place.

TV coverage was announced yesterday, generally on networks which hold club football rights – Setanta Sports in the case of the UK.

I thought A1GP would be held back by being on Sky Sports, so I’m not as sure as I might have been that this is a problem. Setanta is a much smaller operation though, so it remains to be seen. Of course, my issue is that I won’t be able to watch it – and presumably that’ll be the case for many motorsport fans, so in that way it is going to limit the audience.

More drivers have been announced, and fittingly given the football connection, they’re by no means all from the same nation as the club they’re representing. Tristan Gommendy (France) for FC Porto (Portugal), Adrián Vallés (Spain) for Liverpool FC (England), and Robert Doornbos (Netherlands) for AC Milan (Italy). To be fair, though, there are plenty of more fitting drivers: Ryan Dalziel for Rangers FC (Scotland), Antônio Pizzonia for SC Corinthians (Brazil), Borja García for Sevilla FC (Spain).

But there are still a lot of gaps though: we’ve only got 17 of the mooted 20 clubs confirmed, and we only know the driver for 14 of those 17. Will it all be in place for the weekend? I doubt it, but I’m sure the races will go ahead.

My prediction is that AC Milan will come out of the weekend leading the championship, simply because Robert Doornbos has been driving the car longer than anyone else. But there’s a pretty strong field of former GP2 and World Series by Renault drivers, so it could be quite competitive.

There’s a proud tradition in all sections of the specialist media of reporting on not news – stories purporting to be news, but which tell no-one anything new. With a quiet weekend ahead, not news has had a particularly prominent role to play on Autosport this week.

There’s the shock news that NASCAR driver Tony Stewart is aiming to win a race that he’s won four times before. Equally surprising is the news that Chris Vermeulen is targeting another MotoGP podium finish, after finishing on the podium at the last two races. Were it not for these important articles, I would have assumed that both men were intending to do really badly.

We have two revelations from the Ferrari camp. Kimi Raikkonen – who has qualified down in sixth for the last two races – says he needs to qualify better to keep his Formula 1 championship chances alive. Meanwhile, Felipe Massa – who retired from the lead of the last race three laps from home – says that Ferrari need to improve reliability to keep him in the championship fight. This sort of deep insight from drivers into how teams operate is simply invaluable.

Elsewhere, we have word from the A1GP technical director that the new Ferrari chassis the series will be using – which has been designed to encourage overtaking – will allow plenty of overtaking. I would have thought that he would be pessimistic about the new car, and tell us to expect really rubbish racing.