But it also needs more drivers the public can recognise.Tony George, whose family owns the International Motor Speedway and most of Indiana, is aware of the need to grow fresh talent. On Friday night he and his family sat unobtrusively in the public grandstands at nearby Indianapolis Raceway Park watching his stepson, Ed Carpenter, race in the Twin 25s midget car championship race. No luxury suite or other airs and graces, just open-air enthusiasm and affection for a sport cruel enough to see the youngster pitched unharmed into the fence in the early stages.Hard to envisage some of F1’s powers that be watching, say, the Formula Three support race at Silverstone from the public enclosures. But George, who welcomed the launch of an initiative by the Red Bull energy drinks company to nurture American talent for F1, took the Fifth Amendment when asked if he also has a lien not just on the Indy F1 race – a masterstroke from powerbroker Bernie Ecclestone to bring F1 back to America’s self-styled”capital of auto racing” – but also any other F1 race in the United States.Traditional events such as the San Marino GP at Imola and the Belgian GP at Spa-Francorchamps may pave the way for events in Bahrain and China, and possibly a second US GP An American F1 driver would help that. Cart refugees Bryan Herta and Townsend Bell are working to that end, and on Friday IRL racer Sarah Fisher became the first female to drive an F1 car at a grand prix meeting since 1992 when she demonstrated Kimi Raikkonen’s spare McLaren.It was a tough call in front of 50,000 race fans. “Any race-car driver in America will tell you the ultimate is to drive these cars for a couple of laps,” she said. “There’s always going to be differences in every car you drive, but the biggest difference between an Indycar and a Formula One was acceleration and deceleration forces.

The first time,the acceleration throws you back in the seat.”It was great fun I didn’t get to light it up very much. I only had three laps, and by the third lap I’m thinking: ‘OK, at Turn Four I can go in a bit deeper there,’ and then on the radio I heard: ‘OK, park it down on the bricks, you’re done.’ “On the racetrack so far Michael Schumacher has done nothing to suggest that win 11 of his runaway season will elude him this afternoon, but team-mate Rubens Barrichello had a scare when a tyre problem put him hard into the innovative “soft” safety wall in the banked final turn on Friday morning, doing his Ferrari a power of no good. With Montoya lying way down the times with engine problems in his BMW Williams, it wasn’t a hot day for Schumacher’s rivals.”You can’t always have reliability, and we’ll use a different engine today,” Montoya joked prior to qualifying on Saturday. But the bulletproof nature of Schumacher’s car – he has finished the last 20 grands prix, 19 of them on the podium – makes him the favourite yet again.Who knows, if he wins here maybe they will send him to the front of the queue next time he sneaks into Texas Motor Speedway.. Any suggestions a couple of weeks ago that it would be Batley and Oldham vying this weekend to make further progress in the Northern Ford Premiership play-offs would have been greeted with something close to incredulity. Oldham, disrupted by the loss of two coaches and two potential home grounds over the past year, barely scraped into the play-offs on the last day of the regular season.

Batley finished two places higher, but also had the look of a team there to make up the numbers.It hasn’t quite worked out like that. Batley have gone to two clubs who finished above them – Doncaster and Featherstone – and knocked them out. The Bulldogs have thrived on being underdogs, and viewers of ITV’s Rugby League Raw – back for a welcome third season to give the true flavour of the NFP play-offs – will have seen how their coach, Paul Storey, assessed the daunting reputation of Doncaster’s Belle Vue ground.”House of Pain? What a crock of shite,” he told his players before they won 27-14. Going to Featherstone and winning was an even more creditable result – even though it hinged largely on two players who will not be at the club next year.Glen Tomlinson has had an eventful career in this country, playing successfully for Bradford and Hull, as well as becoming one of the victims of Wakefield’s implosion two years ago. That left the Australian scrum-half without a job, but Batley – where he made his initial impact in Britain – picked him up again and have benefited from some outstanding performances. His half-back partner, Dean Lawford, will be in Super League next season with Widnes, and those who have watched him in the NFP this season believe he has matured as a player.The threat that the two carry will come as no surprise to the Oldham coach, Steve Molloy, who played at Batley earlier this season before returning to his home-town club. Molloy has brought much-needed stability following the loss of Mike Ford to the Irish rugby union team and his successor, John Harbin, to Oldham Athletic.