The arrival of Bruno Senna in motor racing has predictably excited some press interest in recent years.

The specialist media have followed his path through Formula BMW, F3 and GP2 closely.

Now, as F1 teams start to take serious interest in him, the international media are waking up to the man whose blood relation to the late Ayrton Senna could make him the most marketing-friendly F1 signing since Lewis Hamilton.

Sons and nephews of famous former motor racing drivers getting into the sport themselves is nothing new. (Daughters and nieces doing it is much rarer). But does too much of it go on?

F1 today already has the sons of Keke Rosberg, Satoru Nakajima and Nelson Piquet. Add Bruno Senna next year and a fifth of the F1 grid would be immediate descendants of previous drivers.

Having a famous surname can be a help or a hindrance. Nelson Piquet Jnr never had to worry about finding a team to run him in Formula 3 or GP2, because he always drove for his dad’s team.

Bruno Senna, however, was kept from racing for nine years after his uncle Ayrton was killed in 1994. But the younger Senna will surely have found that with his name comes sponsors and benefactors – like Toro Rosso boss Gerhard Berger.

Meanwhile other drivers without the connections get left on the sidelines. Scottish racer Paul di Resta beat Sebastian Vettel in the Formula Three Euroseries in 2006 (the same championship Hamilton won the previous year) but his single seater career went no further.

Formula 1 is already desperately short of seats – 10 teams is a miserable number for the world’s premier motor racing series. They should be going to the very best drivers, not just the ones with the familiar eyes and the PR-friendly surnames.

I say this not to disparage the skills of Bruno Senna or Nelson Piquet Jnr or the rest. But with billions of possible racing drivers in the world, when so many of the few that make it into F1 happen to be famous sons and nephews, perhaps team bosses are paying too much attention to family trees.