Honda, BMW, and now Toyota. There were a lot of rumours floating around today. What a shame. Here [PDF] is the very bland release from the company, published just minutes ago.

It would be nice, but for now it's not going to happen—Autoblog:

What do you do after making it to the pinnacle of rallying and winning a record-shattering six consecutive world championships? Anything you want—or so you'd think—but Sebastien Loeb is running into some roadblocks that appear to have derailed his plans to try his hand at Formula One.

Singing his praises after one race would have been premature, and two is still cutting it a bit short, but we'll say it: he has something special. Axis has a video. Remember he's been driving a Toyota. And if Button wanted to let him through last race, that was not the best way.

Anyone's favourite driver already? Maybe this will help:

When asked that if there had been no F1 chance for next year would he have returned to GP2, Kobayashi said: "No, no, no. I have no budget, no budget. So I cannot drive GP2 for next year.

"I would probably go back to Japan to maybe work with my father in his sushi restaurant! It was like that two months ago, seriously. When I was 16 years old, I worked there - making sushi!"

Kobayashi has said he knew that, after a disappointing campaign in GP2 this year, he needed to impress in his two race outings for Toyota.

From F1Fanatic:

In short, they no longer felt the marketing benefit of being in F1 was worth the cost involved in supplying the tyres. With up to four more teams in F1 next year, they are facing a 40% increase in their annual supply demand, and it's doubtful they were going to get 40% more exposure in exchange for it. And that's before one considers the additional cost of an extra two races.

Supporting grooved tyres in 1998, Indianapolis 2005, plus the contest-free role of sole supplier since 2007, and now they go and quit. Nice one.

This Spanish news site reports [Spanish] an exclusive on the new Formula 1 team signing Senna, and wanting to sign De la Rosa.

Apparently there is a pre-agreement with De la Rosa. But as reported in Motorsport.com the McLaren reserve is understandably a little hesitant right now.

Following on from the Q3 chaos at Hungary this year, a look at timing technology in Formula 1—The Art of Timing:

… When veteran Gerhard Berger lost the pole by just .008 of a second for Ferrari against Schumacher’s Benetton at Imola in 1995, the distance separating the two was… 57.2 cms.

There’s a similar piece in Popular Mechanics.

While everyone is busy repeating Ferrari's press release, The Formula 1 Condition has done well with this take on things:

I can't help but stress: for those of you in the MENA region, purchase your Bahrain GP tickets. It will be anything but disappointing.

Kickass Japanese video.

The Guardian:

"Fernando isn't always the most demonstrative of guys, but when he was walking down the paddock he almost looked as though he wanted to leap into the air and click his heels together," he said. "He looked like a guy who'd pulled off the deal of his life."

But at this point the more exciting announcement has to be Kimi going back to McLaren.

You cannot beat Wired magazine for making geek sound so exciting:

During Hakkinen's test run before the Italian Grand Prix, the McLaren crew follows the progress of his MP4-15 on TV screens in the team's Autodromo garage. Revving to 17,000 rpm, the car reaches nearly 200 mph on a back straightaway. The battle stations glow a healthy green - red readouts mean bad news - as the Finn's car, carrying more than 120 sensors, relays 3-Mbyte chunks of information via telemetry to the pit, delivering data on everything from brake temperature to oil pressure. When Hakkinen posts the fastest practice lap so far, the engineers give each other congratulatory backslaps.

The lap chart is out [PDF].

Hamilton was just four laps away from leading the complete GP. I bet he would tried for a Grand Chelem otherwise. They're not easy, at least these days. Last one of those was over 10 years ago, Monaco 1998: