Talk Steer: Tony Dodgins on...

It's no great surprise that Red Bull has confirmed that it will promote Sebastian Vettel to the senior team alongside Mark Webber in 2009, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

How quick is Webber? It's a subject that splits the paddock. Some think he's a competent, quick bloke who would win races in a front-running car and, possibly, a championship in a superior one.

Others think he's rather better than that. They point to the quality of the team-mates he's seen off, and the consistently strong qualifying performances. Some suggest he's not the greatest racer while others, quite reasonably, appreciate that if he puts the car further up the grid than it deserves to be, you can't be too surprised when it goes backwards in the race.

Vettel will beat Webber; oh no he won't

The jury is out to a similar extent on Vettel. Some think he's the greatest thing since Michael Schumacher, while others can contain their enthusiasm. He was a BMW driver as well as being a Red Bull junior. And apparently he wasn't on a piece of Dietrich Mateschitz elastic when he was at BMW.

If he was contractually free, it makes you wonder why Munich, with plenty of opportunity to evaluate him, didn't keep hold of him. The conclusion, evidently, was that Robert Kubica was so strong he simply had to have a race seat. But if Vettel was only a gnat's slower, and Nick Heidfeld already contracted, you can hardly call Sebastian shabby.

"It's a coup for the team," Webber said after the announcement. "Sebastian is the first real Red Bull-backed driver to come through their programme who has the talent to back the cash." And then he added: "If he blows me away people will say Webber's past it, but if I blow him away then people will say Vettel's not quick. That's normal. I had it with Rosberg..."

Within 10 minutes on Saturday I had two people close to Red Bull proferring an opinion. "Vettel will rapidly get on top," said one. "Vettel will get quite a big shock," said another.

At Hockenheim, the future team-mates were nip-and-tuck all weekend, Vettel feisty throughout as he scored a fine eighth for Toro Rosso. He qualified just behind Webber and beat him off the line. Mark would probably have passed him in a normal run, fuelled longer to the second stop, but he didn't get that far.

You can look at it two ways. You can say, 'Wow, here's a guy in what's basically the Minardi team scoring points on merit in the most competitive F1 midfield there's ever been'. Or you can say, 'There's a young, competitive driver in a Red Bull with a better engine, so why shouldn't he take it to the senior team once in a while?' Certainly, since Toro Rosso launched the STR3, Vettel has been right there.

F1 races losing money in Germany

The Germans, certainly, will be hoping Vettel is the new wunderkind. For the third successive grand prix we were at a track hosting a classic race, where there was doubt about the future. One rumour even suggested that Hockenheim was about to go belly-up the morning after the race.

Hockenheim MD Karl-Josef Schmidt firmly denied it. "I heard that last night," he told us on Saturday, "and I don't know where it's spreading from. We have a contract for the race in 2010, and are willing and able to fulfil it."

He did not deny that the German GP operates at a loss of around €3 million: "But Hockenheim does many other things and if you look at our balance sheet you will see that the figures are black."

It was not, he said, life post-Schumi: "The decline in the number of spectators started in 2004, even though Schumacher was at the peak of his career. We have five German drivers and two German teams. Okay, I admit we need a hero like Michael, and perhaps Vettel will be one in 2010. But we have a resolution made last summer by the city council of Hockenheim that, if there should be a lack of liquidity or capital, they would fill it. We are in a safe position."

Nurburgring, he pointed out, is in a relatively poor area, and also benefits from a degree of government funding to prop up the race. The alternating deal suits both of them because they only make a thumping loss one year in two.

Can this go on? And can it be right for a country currently boasting 25 per cent of the grand prix grid - with Mercedes and BMW, plus Cologne-based Toyota - to be left hoping Vettel is the next Schumacher and attracts 150,000 through the gates on Sunday so that its race can break even? With the money sloshing around F1, why can't some be reinvested so that tracks have half a chance of making some cash?

At the same time, we were listening to Vijay Mallya explaining that he'd just had lunch with a banker, who was extending a facility to allow the Indians to build a sparkling track in time for 2010. What price the British GP in Delhi?