Hang on: that's (kind of) proper motor racing: open wheel stuff. OK, so the Americans have a bizarre love of going round in circles but the IndyCar series does go off and play on some proper race courses (which the Americans, with their endearing lack of precision in English call "road courses." Ah, well, they don't have Monaco, Singapore or - even - Macau, do they?)

Anyway, back to that little press release.

Takuma Sato is going to pilot .....

(oh, and to the American bloggers who recently had a debate about what kind of idiot calls a racing driver a pilot, it's anyone who's ever seen racing in France: that rules out most Americans then except for those who want to find out just what an ALMS car does when it grows up).

Anyway: back to Sato... he's going to pilot the new car which will be called a "Lotus Cosworth."

Hang on: isn't that what the F1 Lotus is called?

Absolutely. But there is nothing in common between the two cars except that the IndyCar will, like the F1 car, appear in traditional Lotus colours of Dark Green and Mustard Yellow.

If you like, you can start making dots on a piece of paper - you'll need help to join them all up by the end of this.

Lotus had success in the USA in the 1960s - winning the Indianapolis 500 in 1965 driven by Jim Clarke.

Although Lotus will build the car and Cosworth will provide the power, it will be run by KV Racing - Jimmy Vasser being the better known V part of that equation. Vasser and Kevin Kalkhoven and issued a joint statement saying "We are delighted to be part of Lotus and Cosworth's return to the IndyCar Series, and with Takuma at the wheel of the classic racing green and yellow Lotus Cosworth race car, we expect to be formidable competitors this year."

The press release includes a quote from Sato: "This is fantastic news for everyone. It is exitingfor me to be a Lotus driver and I'm really looking forward to great success with this new project." He probably meant "exciting." Still, he's still smarting over not getting a seat with Lotus F1, according to some rumours.

But the announcement was made on the 13 March and included the note that The 2010 IndyCar Series starts with the Sao Paolo Indy 300, Brazil on the 14th of March 2010.

There have been several high-level appointments at Lotus in the past few months including Dany Bahar as Group CEO of Group Lotus. He's a former Ferrari man and when he arrived made it plain that one of his first jobs would be to improve the brand beyond its cult status. Of the entry to US racing he said "Racing has always defined Lotus and on many occasions in motorsports history Lotus' numerous innovations have re-defined racing. It's only fitting that as the Lotus Racing name re-enters Formula 1, we will also race and innovate again in IndyCar. The Lotus name will, once again compete in the top two open-wheel racing series for the passion and enthusiasm of car fans around the globe."

Although Lotus ran with a variety of engines in their pre-demise, late 1980s and early 1990s phase, their name is inextricably linked with that of Cosworth.

Colin Chapman innovated in chassis and dynamics including aero whilst Mike Costin and his partner Keith Duckworth innovated in engine technology. Together they were formidable.

And both companies went, to all intents and purposes, bust.

Lotus Cars and the Lotus racing teams were separate companies. When the F1 team collapsed, the car company, already in deep trouble, found a buyer in GM; later GM sold it to Proton where it forms the backbone of the development team - as well as providing advanced development and engineering to many other companies. Now Lotus Engineering and Lotus Cars are divisions of the same company.

Lotus Racing, the F1 team, is technically an entirely separate entity although Proton is a sponsor. Lotus has kept itself on track with sports cars and is launching a European race series this year.

Cosworth has had an even rockier past: like many racing engines, Cosworth sold their engines as OEM kit - their main customer was Ford. The company went through a succession of owners including United Engineering Industries which was taken over by the bizarre growth of Carlton Communications - a London local TV broadcaster that became a vehicle for a ridiculously diverse range of takeovers.

Carlton sold Cosworth to arms manufacturer Vickers (they make tanks but have lost their name and are now part of BAe) during which time it developed some clever patents for aluminium processes to help in high-stress engines. Vickers later sold it to VW. VW didn't know what to do with the racing bit (ha, Audi would kill for it now - although the casting division was retained and formed the basis of the new series of Audi engines that have brought the marque back from dullsville) and back-to-back sold the racing division to Ford which seemed both logical and something of a homecoming.

But Ford's foray into F1 with cars branded - oddly - as Jaguar was a bit of a disaster. The company had been split again into "Racing" and "powertrains." The ally block business was sold off by VW and the purchasers of that bought the power train bit from Ford. That's not where our interest lies except as a footnote: the interesting thing is what happened to "Racing."

Ford sold the F1 team - and Cosworth racing - to the owners of "the other" open wheel race series in the USA - Champ Cars, formerly CART. Champ Cars ran, almost always, on proper racing circuits - or airfields. So who were the owners? Gerald Forsythe (who?) and Kevin Kalkhoven. Yes, the one that is the less famous half of KV Racing with Jimmy Vasser.

The CART / Champ Car series was a breakaway series and because Americans like closed round-the-walls racing, the attempt to build a race series similar to the rest of the world failed.

In 2003, CART went broke: a buyout by Kalkhoven and others brought it back with all cars running Cosworth engines after Ford sold out in 2004 and after a couple of name-changes it became Champ Car. But in 2008, the series collapsed after just one event and entered into a shot-gun marriage with IRL. One of the teams that went over to IRL was the team now known as KV Racing.

So, as in F1 Cosworth has come back after a four year hiatus, so it is heading back to the USA where it has not been in single seat racing since 2006: IndyCar has been, in essence, a one-make series with chassis contracts with Dallara and engines supplied by Honda. The engine contract expired at the end of last season. The chassis contract, however, still has a year to go.

Dallara have built the chassis for the Campos / HRT F1 team: in fact when the FIA originally listed its 2010 teams, one of them was Campos Dallara. Now the HRT team, its engines ... are from Cosworth.

Although Lotus is tight lipped, it seems probable that the chassis is a Dallara, the same as all the others on the grid, but Lotus will have some freedom in relation to set up, suspension and aero. Last month, another of those new hires at the top of Lotus, Claudio Berro, director of motorsport, told Motorsport News "The Indycar programme is a big project and we need to join with an existing team to begin with, because that is the easiest way in terms of logistics." Berro, like Bahar, is a former Ferrari man, but via Fiat's racing division and a foray with the ill-fated Speedcar Series. When he joined Lotus three months ago, he said "Lotus has a peerless motorsport heritage, not just in Formula One, but we have also won in sportscar racing, saloon car racing, world rally championships, Le Mans and the Indy 500. There is no other car company in the world which can lay claim to so many accolades and championships in such a wide variety of motorsport fields, and I am looking forward to re-introducing Lotus to high level motorsport to not only compete and win but also to demonstrate the shared technology between Lotus sportscars and future racing cars."

Like Lotus, Cosworth has not been out of racing: it has a thriving race electronic business (which it has converted into aerospace and alternative fuels expertise) and Cosworth is providing the electronics pack for the BLOODHOUND SSC - a UK-based assault on the 1000 mph land speed record. That's the successor to the Thrust SSC which holds the current Land Speed record. One of the engineers on that car was a chap called Jeremy Bliss who had been an engineer at Lotus working on active suspension and, because the Active Suspension project at Lotus was dead, moved to Thrust SSC which needed the clever suspension.

Thrust SSC was driven by Andy Green who, despite his land speed records had never entered a motor race. Last June he entered a Lotus Elise, painted in BLOODHOUND SSC colours in a race at Snetterton, in the Lotus festival. Green is a (now former) RAF jet fighter pilot. Snetterton is a converted redundant fighter airfield in Norfolk, England - in the deep green grass and mustard fields that give rise to the Lotus colour scheme - just down the road from the factory that Lotus have set up their F1 camp and Hethel, the spiritual home of all things Lotus.

See: we told you it was convoluted. But at least we managed to join all the dots.

Graphic: rendering courtesy Lotus