In an article on autosport
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/67209 Panis says he's thinking of testing for Team France.
More importantly for this thread, he adds that he thinks the new car is 8 or 9 seconds quicker than the current one.
That can't be that far off F1 pace? Based on the qualification times from Sepang, that would put them about 2-3 seconds off F1 pole times.
Incidentally, whilst looking that stat up, Wikipedia claims that the pole position time for A1's race in Shanghai was faster than F1's. Was the track used the same?