Forged from the remnants of Minardi, Toro Rosso is Red Bull's junior F1 team. The arrangement lets Red Bull (a) try out unproven young drivers and (2) take cocky french multiple Champ Car champions down a peg or two.

The team benefits from an unspecified amount of help from its senior team but is still free to plough its own furrow. In 2007, for instance, it used Ferrari engines rather than the Renault power units favoured by Red Bull, which proved, if nothing else, that the Ferrari team must have had one hell of a chassis.

Toro Rosso has yet to inspire the same level of support enjoyed by Minardi, although it was on the right lines when a senior manager occasioned a physical assault upon the wholly objectionable Scott Speed. Keep it up, lads, and we'll put our not inconsiderable weight behind you.

Sebastien Bourdais is a stroppy french racing driver who's dabbled in a number of motorsport disciplines with varying levels of success, although he will always be remembered at dotdotdotcomma for entertaining the crowd at the 2007 Race of Champions with a sizeable hissy fit after crashing with what he claimed was a stuck throttle and then stomping off in a huff of which any teenager would have been proud. It's all just for fun, Sebastien mon ami.

Bourdais won the International F3000 Championship at the third attempt, beating career GP2 racer Giorgio Pantano by a couple of points but only claiming the title following a failed drugs test by points leader Tomas Enge, who had alerted officials to the possibility that he was indulging in substance abuse by claiming that he could drive his car upside-down across a ceiling.

For the 2003 season, Bourdais signed a deal to race in F1 for Arrows, who promptly went bust, so the surly frenchman jetted across to America to have a crack at Champ Car racing. He started his very first race from pole and went on to win four consecutive titles from 2004 to 2007, becoming the first person since Ted Hat in 1948 to do the horn trick, or possibly the first person since Ted Horn in 1948 to do the hat trick.

His second go at getting into F1 led to a race seat with Toro Rosso for the 2008 season, during which he was consistently blown away by promising rookie Sebastian Vettel and his humour improved not one jot.

He somehow managed to keep his seat into 2009, this time partnering promising rookie Sebastien Buemi, until Toro Rosso finally lost patience with (a) his bad form and (ii) his bad temper, and sacked him after the German Grand Prix, even going so far in their desperation to get rid him as to replace him with someone not called Sebastien.

Nelson Angelo Piquet has six names, although we've picked his three best known ones. He is commonly known as Nelson Piquet Junior and also as Nelsinho Piquet, which he has asked people not to use any more.

Nelsinho is the son of Nelson Piquet, who claimed three world championships and made no friends along the way. His father's money meant that he could race for his own team all the way up to GP2, after which things get a bit expensive even for multi-millionaires.

His last championship was in 2004 when he won the British F3 title, although the perenially under-funded and criminally under-rated Ulsterman Adam Carroll heroically took the fight to the last event at Brands Hatch, about which we could go on but probably shouldn't.

Little Nelson competed in GP2 and A1GP, before curiously being picked up by the Renault F1 équipe, first as a test driver and subsequently as a racer, where his disappointing form was about what many of the more astute paddock observers had been expecting.

The perception of him as a sulky rich kid was given further weight when, after being sacked by Renault part way through 2009, he went running to the FIA with allegations of race-fixing, claiming that some bigger boys had forced him to crash deliberately at Singapore in 2008, in order to put team-mate Fernando Alonso on exactly the right strategy to claim the win.

The revelation was indeed shocking. We'd all got so used to seeing Piquet crash that believing he'd done so on purpose was difficult to reconcile. The fall-out saw Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds lose their jobs and, if there's any justice, brought an end to Nelsinho's career in the top flight.