Alonso looks for magic ride at Indy
He is quite the amateur magician on the quiet, Fernando Alonso. A favourite pastime in his Formula One motorhome is to impress friends, corporate guests and even the odd passing journalist with his slick conjuring tricks, which include multiple three- card sleights of hand.
The passion was imparted by his uncle and he has since acquired a degree of talent that could rival that of fellow world champion Nigel Mansell, a fully- fledged member of the Magic Circle, who once held shows where he would use a stacked deck to make correct deductions of audience members’ telephone numbers.
By far Alonso’s greatest act of sorcery, though, would be to pull off a victory in Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, a veritable symphony of chaos at 370 km/ h. For all that his F1 mastery should prove a telling point, he is also, history would suggest, a hostage to fortune.
These 200 l aps of the Brickyard derive their thrill from being perched on a ragged edge where, as France’s Sebastian Bourdais starkly demonstrated this week, the faintest feathering of the steering wheel in the wrong direction can lead to a ghastly acquaintance with a concrete wall.
Mario Andretti, whose grandson Marco is on the grid alongside Alonso this weekend, had it about right. “If everything seems under control,” he once said, “you’re not going fast enough.”
It is testament to Andretti’s versatility that he remains the only driver to have accomplished the treble of an F1 world title, an Indy 500 victory, and a 1967 triumph in “The Great American Race,” the Daytona 500 in NASCAR.
Alonso’s abiding hope is that this mid- season experiment with U. S. oval racing can make him just the second person, after Graham Hill, to combine the world championship with Indianapolis success and, finally, a share in team glory at Le Mans.
Alonso is a precious bridge to F1’s daredevil past, when John Surtees blazed around Monte Carlo in a car comprising the reconstituted parts of a Triumph Herald, and when James Hunt was a smouldering human cocktail of adrenalin and testosterone. One story has it that Hunt, also the consummate playboy away from the track, stitched a message in his racing overalls that read: “Sex — breakfast of champions.”
Alonso would be about as likely to draw attention to himself in this way as to join a fan club for Honda, the makers of McLaren’s bedevilled engines. In the years that he won his two championships with Renault, he lived abstemiously in a riverside flat in Oxford, a short drive from team headquarters in Enstone.
Alonso owes his reputation solely to the fact that his driving is a study in on-the-limit brilliance. There is arguably not another man alive who could have propelled the misfiring McLaren to seventh on the grid, as he managed in Barcelona this month. Ask any contemporaries of his in the paddock, and he is the last driver they would want to see glowering in their rearview mirrors. Take this verdict from Lewis Hamilton: “I’ve only ever said that he is one of the best drivers, if not the best driver here.”
Alonso is embracing a new challenge in Indianapolis. There is nothing on four wheels quite like the exhilaration of tearing down the Brickyard straights, braking to a leisurely 360 km/ h for the corners, with the gaps to cars in front and behind measured in inches.
There is also nothing resembling the sheer spectacle of race day, when a quarter of a million souls converge on the oval.
Success on Sunday is far from likely. But this is one rare moment when a celebrated driver could, if every plot twist goes his way, cement his legend.