Around the tracks April 17 2009

JOHN MARTIN and Team Australia only took a 10th and a 12th from the latest round of the A1GP series in Portugal as Team Netherlands took the sprint race and Switzerland scooped the feature event. The feature race win gave Neel Jani his 10th A1GP feature victory, a record for the category, while the overall results for the weekend leave Australia holding 12th place in the A1 championship and trailing well behind pace-setters Switzerland, Ireland and Portugal.

CHRIS Dyer has just been promoted to team manager of the Ferrari grand prix team after a crisis meeting intended to get the Italian superteam back on track in this year's world championship. After guiding Michael Schumacher and Kimi Raikkonen to world titles as their race engineer the transplanted Australian was originally moved up to chief track engineer for 2009 but - after the worst season start since 1992, with zero points from the first two races - team manager Luca Baldisserri has been switched to a factory job and Dyer has moved up.

RYAN Briscoe is favourite as the Indy Racing League makes its first visit to the former heartland of Champ Car racing at Long Beach this weekend. Team Penske took first and sixth with Briscoe and Will Power at the IRL season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg in Florida and is expected to be just as strong on the California street course.

MARK Winterbottom has a new website. The lead driver for Ford Performance Racing, and last year's V8 Supercar championship runner-up, is moving to the latest technology and will file from his mobile telephone using the popular Twitter system to keep things current at www.markwinterbottom.com

AMERICAN veteran Paul Tracy has finally found a place for this year's Indianapolis 500 despite failing with plans for a fulltime return to racing in the Indy Racing League. Tracy, who has not raced at all since a one-off Champ Car start last July, will drive at Indy with the KV Racing Technology team.

SOME of Australia's fastest young rally drivers will go all-out in May to win a fully-paid promotion to the World Rally Championship. They will tackle Rally Queensland, a round of the 2009 FIA Asia-Pacific Rally Championship, as the regional qualifying event for the Pirelli Star Driver program. The ultimate prize, if they make it through the whole Pirelli process, is one of five WRC scholarships for 2010.