"Once upon a time, motor racing was all about beating the other blokes on the track," said a colleague as we watched as good a scrum form around Gloucester rugby club owner Tom Walkinshaw as he'd seen for weeks. The season was but a few hours old, but already we were embroiled in more politics than sport. We were there to hear Tom's side of the "who has bought Prost and why" story. Not that we learned much.

What has been happening? We all know that Prost was put into liquidation and that there were assets to sell. We've even been told by Max Mosley that the team could, conceivably, we sold and turn up to a Grand Prix, even if they missed Australia. Sure, they would have to pay a penalty and they would have to fulfil certain conditions to the governing body.

It seems it wasn't quite as simple as that. The team went into liquidation but what assets did they have? The machines, it seems, weren't owned by the team and like parts of the building, were leased to the team by a company owned by! Alain Prost. So they weren't there to be sold. And the team wasn't that valuable in terms of assets.

Its main asset, it seems, was its entry into the Formula One World Championship - providing conditions as above were fulfilled. And it had vast debts. At one point, the price for the team was around $30m, but now it seems that it has been snapped up for a tenth of that.

Paul Stoddart admitted to trying to buy it, as a spoiler, because he didn't want Formula One as a whole and individual teams to be devalued, by being able to buy a team for peanuts. Indeed, he admits to pushing the price up, simply to stop Walkinshaw - or anyone else - buying it too cheaply.

He continued his tactics right up to the last moment, which he believed to be Thursday evening. After that, he said, a team couldn't enter the World Championship anyway. According to the Concorde agreement, he said, that was the case - but that's not what Mosley told us a couple of weeks ago. However, Walkinshaw came in with a final bid on Friday morning, and reportedly snapped it up for 2.6 million Euros.

And Stoddart is livid about it. Why? Because of the aforementioned reasons, that it devalues Formula One? Or because he missed out on a bargain?

Walkinshaw has already admitted that he is involved, but is not the buyer. He is expecting to provide the engineering side of things - for which some people say read "Arrows V10 engines etc" because Jean Todt told us yesterday afternoon that Ferrari wouldn't be supplying anyone else with engines, so they are going to have to use some other power plant, and Tom just happens to have a few, plus last year's chassis of course - or Prost's.

It is all a slightly silly storm in a tea-cup, which is mildly tiresome and tearing us away from the real business of the day, which is Formula One. We saw Ferrari being brilliant, Williams predictably good, Sauber where we thought and Toyota very surprising. McLaren were disappointing, Fisichella won the battle of the Hondas and Trulli doesn't seem to have benefited from his move to Renault.

All that's going to change, you can be sure of that, but for the moment it's the politics that occupy many minds and there's more to come. We'll cover Mr Mosley's proposal for Formula One cost-cutting at a future date, but that's going to come to a head on March 19. For the moment, let's enjoy the Australian Grand Prix!

Bob Constanduros