MOTOR SPORT:FORMULA ONE'S return to action around the streets of Valencia should have been all about the simultaneous return of Michael Schumacher but in the absence of the seven-time world champion attention yesterday shifted to the future of the one driver to beat him in the final years of the German's reign over the sport – Fernando Alonso.

Hardly surprising. This European Grand Prix is after all the Spaniard’s second home race of the season and despite the declining fortunes of his Renault team, Alonso, the sport’s youngest ever champion, remains a superstar here. Little wonder then that a sponsor-pleasing quickest lap in practice yesterday was met with noisy approval from the grandstands. Little wonder too that speculation as to the double champion’s future dominated paddock tittle-tattle at a race dampened by the absence of Schumacher.

Under normal circumstances such silly-season rumours linking a star driver with a star team would be marked as the sort of Monday morning quarter-backing the Formula One paddock specialises in on a quiet Friday. But with Alonso the speculation linking him with a 2010 move to Ferrari has been growing for months and yesterday McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh gave further credence to the notion, reckoning the move to be an open-secret that will cause a ripple up and down the grid.

“I think we all know the Fernando-Ferrari move has a knock-on effect that ripples through the other teams,” he said in reference to his own team’s position with its two drivers, Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen. “At the moment we are not in conversation with any other drivers and we will see in the future in reality there are some changes probably with Fernando and Ferrari and that frees up the driver market.

“Every year there are a number of pivotal points during the season which determine what is going to happen in the drivers’ market. This year I think we all know the Fernando-Ferrari move has a knock on and that ripples through the other teams, clearly the BMW withdrawal also has also had an impact.”

Ferrari, naturally, were swift to deny either of its drivers, Kimi Raikkonen or the injured Felipe Massa, would be dislodged from their race seats. “He (Whitmarsh) can say what he wants, there is no ‘Fernando-Ferrari move’,” said a spokesman for the Italian team. “We have two drivers with a contract until the end of 2010. We are not under pressure to change anything.”

If the Spaniard does oust Raikkonen from Ferrari it could provoke one of the biggest driver shuffles in on the grid in recent years.

BMW-Sauber’s Nick Heidfeld and highly-rated Robert Kubica are already free agents after the parent company’s withdrawal from 2010 and the future of title leader Jenson Button at the waning Brawn GP is also open to question, the British driver’s stock now high enough to seek a move away from a team from whom the fairytale glow is already fading.

The situation at McLaren too is unclear, with under-performing Kovalainen’s seat threatened, most notably by Nico Rosberg, currenly dragging a midfield Williams into the points positions each race weekend. One of the few settled line-ups is that of Red Bull Racing, who having confirmed the 2010 signing of Mark Webber at the Nurburgring last month, yesterday revealed Sebastian Vettel has signed a contract extension keeping him at the team until the end of 2011.

If all that is as clear as mud, the one concrete fact is Alonso cannot spend another season putting in show laps on Friday afternoon to make a Renault team look good as it treads championship water.

The two-time champion’s late afternoon, almost certainly low-fuelled, quickest lap came despite a mid-session collision with Nick Heidfeld and a spin soon after but was good enough to demote the Brawns of Button and Rubens Barrichello to second and third respectively.

Practice though is practice and Friday’s times are a notoriously unreliable form guide. For Alonso, and for the Brawns, the ominous presence was that of the in-form, title-chasing Red Bulls, Vettel and Webber, nestled in the lower half of the top 10 and blandly confident having done what they needed to ahead of qualifying this afternoon.

With the Brawns at his shoulder and the Red Bulls lurking, dismissal in the grid shake-up is likely to once again reacquaint Alonso with the notion that the one immutable in F1 is change.