Adrian Sutil plays the piano well, speaks several languages and also happens to be a Formula One driver, the git.

On the way to F1, he raced in the All-Japan Formula Three Championship, Formula Masters Austria and even Swiss Formula Ford, which came as a bit of a surprise to us because we had it on good authority that motorsport had been outlawed in the land of cuckoo clocks, disappointing cheese and iffy bank accounts. Shows what we know.

Sutil also dabbled in A1GP, using the fact of his father's ancestry to race for Team Germany, although he could just as easily have driven for Uruguay (had there been such a team), by virtue of his mother's country of birth, or indeed for any other team on the grid, by virtue of A1GP's celebrated relaxed attitude towards the concept of nationality.

In F1, Sutil has driven for Midland, Spyker and Force India, all of which are, of course, the same team. It was his bad luck to join what used to be the Jordan team at the start of its most turbulent and unstable period, although on the plus side, he now has lifetime supplies of Kingfisher beer, Dutch sports cars and whatever it is that Midland make.

Much like celebrities who get hitched to entirely inappropriate partners, the team formerly known as Toleman has the kind of history that should make any prospective bedfellow run a mile. Lotus F1 is merely the latest in a line of rebrands that has seen Toleman beget Benetton, Benetton beget Renault and now Renault beget Lotus.

Much like many of those those same celebrities, the marriage probably won't last very long, which would be A Good Thing because this name change means that there have now been three distinct Formula One teams called Lotus: the original and best Team Lotus, Tony Fernandes's short-live Lotus Racing and now Lotus F1.

In its favour, the team has brought back to the sport the legendary black and gold livery made famous by the original Team Lotus when it was shamelessly accepting sponsorship from tobacco pushers John Player. Its origin may not be anything to shout - or, perhaps, to wheeze asthmatically - about but the colours undeniably look good on a racing car and it does at least make a refreshing change from "mainly white, with some sponsor logos splashed randomly about".

After Ireland, Russia and Holland had had a go, Indian billionaire Vijay Mallya stepped in to buy the old Jordan squad, encouraged by F1's desire to break into the Indian market, presumably because the sub-continent is home to an awful lot of potential new smokers.

Despite looking every inch the medallion man, Mallya is undoubtedly a shrewd operator, albeit one who was foolhardy enough to become the team's fourth owner in as many years, and he was welcomed into the paddock by everyone except Flavio Briatore, who thought he was taking the piss.

For its first season in 2008, the team boasted customer Ferrari engines, Mike Gascoyne as Chief Technology Officer and, um, Giancarlo Fisichella but when Super Aguri stopped turning up to keep the Force India cars off the back row, the team looked like becoming a perennial back-marker, although at Monaco in 2008 Adrian Sutil came within a handful of laps of claiming fourth place, until Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen lost control braking for the Nouvelle Chicane and punted him out of the race, an incident that the FIA saw fit to overlook.