Ah, the wildcard entry. There’s little better than seeing a rider or driver on an unfamiliar grid, beating the regulars. Unless you’re one of the regulars, of course.

Formula 1

Formula 1 doesn’t do wildcards. It’s a shame, but I can’t see how it could work.

Ferrari – famously keen on the idea of running a three-car team – would probably enter a wildcard at every race. Probably the same driver, if they could get away with it.

Instead, one driver getting a chance in F1 means another losing out. Karun Chandhok is the lucky one this weekend in Germany, taking the place of Jarno Trulli at Team Lotus. No bad thing.

MotoGP

Maybe it’s because there’s not as much spare cash sloshing around the sport, but there are no such restrictions on wildcards in MotoGP. And they can provide some real highlights.

Troy Bayliss, for example, winning the final race of the 2006 season at Valencia, on a wildcard entry for Ducati, having already won the World Superbike title for them. That was in place of the injured Sete Gibernau though, so perhaps not the purest example of a wildcard.

There’s a proper wildcard entry for AMA rider Ben Bostrom this weekend at Laguna Seca. He’ll double the number of riders at LCR Honda, persumably as a bit of a kick up the arse for Toni Elias. It’ll be fascinating to see how he gets on.

Hopper

The man LCR Honda really wanted was apparently John Hopkins – who suddenly finds himself in demand this season, after a couple of troubled years.

His performance in British Superbikes has been one of the highlights of the year so far. To so quickly return to winning ways, on the unfamiliar and – shall we say – idiosyncratic, circuits of the British Isles is hugely impressive. Hands up who wouldn’t love to see him win the championship? If your hand’s up, shame on you.

He’s already been rewarded by Suzuki with one MotoGP race – standing in for an injured Alvaro Bautista at Jerez – and he’s got a wildcard entry on a second Suzuki at Brno next month. Not only that, but he – along with his BSB team-mate – has a wildcard entry for the World Superbike round at Silverstone.

You can’t blame him for passing on LCR Honda, and not risking his clearly very good relationship with Suzuki. Already I can’t wait to see what he’ll be doing next season.

Superbikes

He’s by no means the only superbike rider to get about.

Tom Sykes had a wildcard entry for the Brands Hatch GP round of British Superbikes last year, with the Kawasaki World Superbike team, and won two of the three races. He’s doing the same again this year.

And before he made his MotoGP debut proper in 2010, Ben Spies had a clutch of wildcard entries: three in 2008 for Suzuki, when he was riding for them in AMA; and one in 2009 for Yamaha, when he won the World Superbike title with them. He scored points in every one of them.

Four wheels

Unless I’m being an idiot – quite possible – wildcards on four wheels don’t tend to be quite so high profile.

There’s a bit of it in touring cars – Colin Turkington at the Donington Park round of the WTCC last weekend, for example. But that didn’t go terribly well.

Rallying too. Volkswagen, for example, preparing for the debut of the Polo R WRC in 2013, by running Skoda Fabia S2000s for various young drivers this season.

But most enticing is The $5,000,000 Challenge in IndyCar – which will see five non-regulars race at the finale in Las Vegas. The lure is a $5 million payout if they win the race. How great an idea is that? Very great.

If only Formula 1 had an appetite for that sort of thing…