You may already have sen this but in the latest US DARPA robot vehicle contest the Mellon University/GM entry came first and , by all accounts, did very well as an autonomous car.
http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/04/robot-goo...ml?partner=iaci
What has this to do with F1. Well in some ways the DARPA challenge is harder than a known racetrack and many years ago nobody beleived that a computer program could beat a chess grand master but it has , and regularly.
I do't know if anybody will want to spend money on an autonomous F1 robot car and it clearly could not run with manned cars. Nonetheless it would be fascinanting to see how well it could do and just how much the driver is "important" in F1 ( given all the arguments).
Maybe a new style of test for young, would be F1 pilots , the car sets a time which they must beat , starting salary based on how much they can beat it. If the lose they can still drive but only for free!