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.

So lovely Mat Jackson - lovely might be a bit strong, but I like him for some reason - finished second in the British Touring Car Championship, in his independent BMW. Colin Turkington finished fourth, in another independent BMW. But Turkington won the independent drivers title. What the fuck?

Still, it’s been an incredibly good season for Jackson, finishing ahead of the likes of Jason Plato. In fact, the independent teams have done extremely well, which bodes well for next season, when we could be down to just one manufacturer team, with the exit of SEAT.

It does make me wonder about the ‘independent’ status though. Only VX Racing, SEAT Sport UK and Team Halfords weren’t independent this year - and that’s only the second non-independent year for Team Halfords, which could be something to do with having won the overall championship recently. It seems faintly ridiculous for a team as established as Team RAC to be classed as independent, though of course they are independent of a manufacturer - and not just on a technicality.

If there is only one manufacturer next year, surely some change of team classification is required to give genuinely smaller teams something to fight for - based on the size and resources of the team, rather than manufacturer affiliation.

The simplest solution would be a separate championship for single-entry teams. But that wouldn’t work, because BMW Dealer Team UK only ran Mat Jackson, whereas the likes of BTC Racing and Arkas Racing ran two cars on what I would imagine to be a significantly lower budget.

The bottom half of the team standings could just be put in their own championship next season, but that doesn’t quite seem fair. For one thing, a rubbish but well funded team would get an undeserved break. For another, the lowest team outside the bottom half would have a reasonable grievance at the arbitrary cut-off point.

So… I don’t know. But the BTCC could look quite different next year, so things ought to change appropriately.

Awful pun alert: Jason Plato and Darren Turner have lost their seats in the BTCC for next season, because SEAT is pulling out of the series.

BTCC boss Alan Gow is being very nice about it, but it’s something of a massive shitter for the championship. The SEAT Cupra Cup UK is being scrapped too.

Vauxhall is the only other manufacturer taking part in the BTCC this season. They seem committed for next year, but will they drop out now too? I think it’s a possibility, because without competition from another manufacturer, there is less for them to gain. Sure, there are some strong independents - indeed some which have beaten Vauxhall to the title - but it’s not quite the same.

Of course, another manufacturer could step in. BMW is a vague possibility, because Mat Jackson already has BMW UK endorsement and branding, and all the independent BMWs are doing well. The independent Chevrolet runners have also been doing better recently, so maybe the BTCC could become appealing with SEAT leaving. I’d be surprised to see Honda come on board, because of the lack of a WTCC works team, and the success of the Halfords-sponsored Team Dynamics cars.

This year’s championship has been competitive right through the field though, so I’m hopeful that the BTCC will remain relatively healthy next year. With or without Plato.

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.

Or: scraps & left overs.

Five broadcasts a lot of motorsport in the middle of the night. I’m working though it.

Motorsport Mundial first, the most recent edition of which featured highlights of the first round of the British Rally Championship, which took place really quite a long time ago. Still, it’s always nice to hear Robbie Head commentating - he’s awful at pretending to be surprised, but he knows his rallying.

Apart from a short feature on Darren Gass, and the Pirelli Star Driver competition he won last year, it was a pretty basic highlights package. But with familiar drivers like Guy Wilks and Mark Higgens, the BRC is a championship worth covering.

The next Motorsport Mundial - whenever that might be - will feature V8 Supercars. So it really is a bag of odds and sods. Which is no bad thing.

I don’t know whether the BRC regularly features in Race and Rally UK or not, but the last edition had highlights of the Ford Saloon Car Championship. What else?

Very short highlights, mind, because - like Motorsport Mundial - the first half of so of the programme was cut to extend Five’s NBA coverage. So both programmes started mid-way through, with no sort of opening sequence or introduction. Very strange, but how many people noticed? Possibly just me.

Ford Saloons, then. Quite good fun! Close racing, and a huge variety of cars, from modern Fiesta back to very old Sierra. But I’m not sure why the coverage is so elaborate - there are on-board cameras, inset with driver and rear-view cameras - or indeed why it’s on TV in the first place. Not that I mind, you understand. It’s just a bit surprising.

Commentary from Ian Sowman and Jonny Palmer was utterly servicable. Though just to be clear, that’s not Dr Jonathan Palmer, former Formula 1 driver and commentator, Formula Two champion, Formula Palmer Audi man, and owner of about half the circuits in Britain through his MotorSport Vision company. Not that one. Obscure motorsport commentator Jonny Palmer. Quite different.

Record it? Yes, but Christ knows what you’ll end up with.

I do wonder how some sponsorship deals come about. It was a stupidly long time before I realised why John George had such strong sponsorship from JAG in the BTCC: it’s his company. I drive past a branch of mobile phone shop JAG every day, and it’s got John George in his BTCC garb in the window. But still it took me ages to work it out.

One I’m still trying to figure out, though, is Lego and the Chilton family. There was Tom Chilton’s Lego Star Wars Honda Civic Type R in the BTCC a few years ago, and now Max Chilton’s British Formula 3 car has got a Lego Batman logo on the side. As far as I can see there isn’t a Chilton on the board of Lego, or the developer of those Lego games, Traveller’s Tales. It could be coincidence, but it’s more likely to be further proof that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Watching the highlights of the weekend’s BTCC races on ITV4 last night, I discovered what it would be like to be Marty McFly, zipping back and forth in time. If his time travelling was restricted to periods of about five minutes at a circuit in North Yorkshire.

The highlights package cut from Mike Jordan trying to pass Fabrizio Giovanardi with Mat Jackson in front of them, to Mat Jackson trying to pass Fabrizio Giovanardi with Mike Jordan behind them.

That didn’t quite sit right in my head, though I wasn’t sure it was wrong. So I flicked back, and yes indeed, the first move happened on lap 12, the second on lap 11. The highlights then moved happily on to lap 13.

I’m probably the only person in the world to notice, and I think I’ll get over it, so although it’s a weird mistake for someone to have made, I’m hopeful that it hasn’t ripped a hole in space-time.

There were queues to get out of the car parks after the BTCC meeting at Thruxton yesterday, as there always are at big events.

Obviously everyone tries to join the main queue for the exit as far up as possible. This might mean driving through gaps in a couple of rows of parked cars then up to the main queue, rather than straight up the row you’re parked in.

To my mind, you can just about get away with this as long as there are plenty of cars still parked in the rows you’re going through.

But if one end of the car park is empty, and there are neat - but long - queues for the exit at either side, then you can’t just drive across the empty car park right up to the exit and form your own - very short - additional queue.

I saw a couple of cars do this yesterday. Annoyingly, the first one got away with it. But the second was challenged by an excellent human being.

He got out of his own car, knocked on the queue-cutting car’s window, and pointed out that there is a queue. The driver evidently ignored him, so the excellent human being sat on his bonnet. There was much cheering at this.

Sadly I don’t know how it ended, because I got out of the car park shortly after, but not before shouting, “Good work!” to the excellent human being. The stewards on the exit seemed chuffed about it too.

I’d like to think that someone got out of a car further back in the queue to take the excellent human being’s place on the bonnet, and that this carried on until the car park was empty.

The BTCC meeting yesterday was predictably excellent.

I really do love Thruxton. How can you not love a circuit where the commentator has to ask for results to be faxed over to him? How delightfully ramshackle.

More substantially, there are some great places to watch from, and you can get satisfyingly close to the track. The complex is still my favourite spot, and I’m sure it was busier this year - as was the whole event, it seemed.

It always strikes me as impressive that they organisers squeeze in ten races, and makes me wonder why more meetings can’t be like that.

The loss of Formula BMW UK is nothing to cry about; the Ginetta Junior Championship is an excellent addition to the bill. It’s incredible that the drivers are as young as 14, and Dino Zamparelli is very clearly one to watch for the future.

Formula Renault UK is now the only single seater race, and actually it’s not bad. The Porsche Carrera Cup GB is utterly irrelevant, with a tragically small entry list and little on-track action. Duncan Tappy’s progress did provide some interest though, so it wasn’t as painful to sit through as I expected.

The Seat Cupra Championship seems to be suffering some shrinkage, but they’re still fast cars driven by good drivers, so I’m not going to complain yet. The obvious star of the support races, though, is the Renault Clio Cup, with approximately eight hundred entrants, who were surprisingly well behaved - though not to say entirely well behaved. Ben Winrow is another driver bound to move on to bigger things soon.

Of course there were some British Touring Car Championship races too. The third race in particular seemed like a stormer, and I’m very much looking forward to eventually watching it on TV - which is always a sign of a good day at the races.

I’m off to Thruxton for the BTCC on Sunday, which is terribly exciting. It’s a couple of years since I’ve been there, and I think it’s an excellent track for spectators.

But what’s the weather going to do? God only knows.

The Met Office must know. They say sunny intervals, 15 degrees.

I used to like weather.co.uk. They’re saying showers and 13 degrees. I’m not so keen on them now, the bloody pessimists. Plus their website’s gone to shit.

You’ve got to love the BBC. And I do: another vote for sunny intervals and 15 degrees.

Metcheck have been getting things wrong a bit lately. But they’re predicting a partly cloudy morning and a fair afternoon, temperatures up to 15 degrees - and I’ll take that.

So the conclusion is that it’s definitely going to be quite nice. Possibly.