It seems that Kobayashi decided that this trend didn’t apply to him, and brought the car home 9th (Brazil) and 6th (Abu Dhabi) for his two races, both times ahead of his team mate, Jarno Trulli (although Trulli managed to cause chaos on the first lap in Brazil, and didn’t finish as a result). The results by themselves are impressive, and aside from some youthful exuberance in taking Nakajima’s front wing off, his driving showed that he was worthy of those results. He fought with the best of them (including our new champion, Button) and often looked an old hand. It would be foolish to disregard Trulli’s experience, and it remains clear that there are lessons to be learned for Kobayashi, yet I can’t help but feel that he’s already managed to show Trulli up.

With a bit of luck we’ll get to see how it plays out after the winter break, however it seems the young aspirant may be on the verge of having his F1 drive pulled out from under his feet. There seem to be early indications that Toyota will be withdrawing from F1 (usual reasons, lack of return in terms of success rate and HQ wanting to scale back their participation due to the economic climate), which could spell the end for young Kamui. If he’s going to race at all next year he’ll either need to be picked up by another team or get some sort of new sponsorship deal to continue his racing in GP2.

His other option, returning to Japan to work in his father’s sushi restaurant, is a lot less glamorous and would certainly be a shameful waste of talent. For the moment it’s a waiting game which may end up with Kobayashi searching for any team who’ll keep him in the sport.

UPDATE: It’s official then, we’ve lost Toyota. With a bit of luck we’ll have a Sauber run team appearing out of the also withdrawing BMW.