Mercedes-Benz is set to buy a chunk of championship leaders Brawn GP, according to F1′s rumour mill. The German manufacturer already has a long-standing stake in McLaren, and supplies engines to Force India, but it’s apparently keen to tie up something more substantial with the Brackley-based team.

The move isn’t thought to affect Mercedes’ McLaren deal, however, with a spokesman for the Woking squad saying that everyone in the silver team is happy with Merc expanding its involvement with Brawn.

If the deal is completed, Mercedes will be bucking the trend of other car manufacturers in the sport, as Honda have already left F1, and BMW are doing the same at the end of the year.

Toyota’s participation is also looking increasingly shaky, with the manufacturer waiting until November to sign off an F1 budget.

In other news, Force India have confirmed that test driver Vitantonio Liuzzi will be in their second car from the Italian GP onwards, now that Giancarlo Fisichella is in at Ferrari to replace the injured Felipe Massa.

Massa’s previous replacement, Luca Badoer, is obviously gutted to no longer be racing for the Scuderia, and has blamed the media for getting him out of the red car.

Interestingly, the only thing Badoer managed to accomplish of any note with his outings for Ferrari is that he’s now stretched his record-holding run of grand prix scoring no points to 50 races.

Renault have been called to an FIA hearing of the World Motorsport Council to answer questions about the alleged race fixing incident.

The French outfit has said it won’t answer any questions to the outside world regarding the allegations, so we’ll have to wait and see on that.

They have said, however, that they’ll be running KERS for the Italian GP, which should help them on the long fast straights.

It’s all going a little crazy in F1 at the moment, and we haven’t even talked about Jenson’s chances at getting back to his winning ways. So we’ll leave that to you…

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