ALONSO LOOKS FOR INDY MAGIC
Victory on Sunday would cement F1 champ’s place in history, writes Oliver Brown.
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 threecard 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’ phone 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 of difference from his rivals, he is also, history would suggest, a hostage to fortune.
These 200 laps of the Brickyard derive their thrill from being perched on a ragged edge where, as France’s Sebastien 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.
Given his dispiriting travails at McLaren, the prospect of the Triple Crown is the one that most stirs his racing blood.
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 apartment in Oxford, a short drive from team headquarters in Enstone.
Elements of his private life are quintessentially F1 — his girlfriend, Linda Morselli, is an Italian lingerie model — but he is far less prone to advertise them than, say, Irish hellraiser Eddie Irvine, his predecessor at Ferrari, who would spend much of the Monaco Grand Prix on super-yacht Anaconda with a harem of groupies.
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 did in Barcelona this month.
Success on Sunday is far from likely, in light of the Indy tradition of throwing up surprises, not least last year’s winner Alexander Rossi, who was considered surplus to requirements at F1 makeweights Caterham.
But this is one rare moment when a celebrated driver could, if every plot twist goes his way, cement his legend.