The Marussia-Carlin tie-up

Chilton/Aon on a Marussia F1 car soon? Photo: Carlin

It was announced yesterday, the Marussia F1 Team have joined forces with Carlin's GP2 team. I have a couple of things to note from this:

Firstly, this isn't the first rather confusing tie-up between an F1 team and a junior team. While Carlin and Marussia will race together in GP2, they are rivals in GP3 - where Marussia are present with the Manor team (the F1 team having been born out of John Booth's successful Manor operation).

It had been known that Manor/Virgin/Marussia/Whatever had wanted to be in GP2 to create a ladder up from Formula Renault through GP3 and onto F1. It would have been nice to see them have their own seperate GP2 squad rather than Lazarus come in, but the Carlin partnership is the next best thing.

We recently had Caterham and Arden join together in Formula Renault 3.5, even though they will continue to race against each other in GP2. Arden's GP2 team has gradually been declining though since Christian Horner stopped his day-to-day operation of the team, so I reckon me might see the two join forces in GP2 before too long - certainly come 2014 when the teams will all need to reapply for the start of a new three-year cycle. Particularly given that the company's name has actually changed from Arden Motorsport Limited to Arden Caterham Motorsport Limited.

And now the second thing to note. Marussia protege Rio Haryanto will be joining Max Chilton at Carlin, who are owned by Max's wealthy father Graeme - chief executive at insurance giants Aon and a keen petrol-head. Chilton will be entering his third season of GP2, and it's clear that he'll be looking towards making the jump to F1 very soon.

Could the Marussia-Carlin tie-up help him to get in at Marussia? They have something of a habit of signing a well-backed driver for their second seat and then dropping them at the end of the year for someone with a bit more cash. I have a feeling that, depending how he does in GP2 this year, we could see Chilton in the Marussia in 2014.

His Dad is already a minor sponsor at McLaren (with exposure only on the arms of the drivers' overalls) - and it's this that could well have got Chilton a couple of opportunities with Force India (who have strong McLaren links) at the end of last year. Don't forget now that Marussia too have a tecnical relationship with McLaren.

Interesting to note that there rumours in the media following Manor's original entry into F1 that they were in talks with Chilton Sr (who they actually referred to as Duncan Chilton) about a partial buy-out that could have seen Max racing for the team, before having even raced in GP2.