F1's Alonso/Indy reaction shows its ignorance

"At the first [world championship] United States Grand Prix, at Sebring in 1959," John Cooper said, "I met Rodger Ward, who had won the Indy 500 that year. He didn't know what road racing was all about, but he was big enough to admit it, and we became great friends. You must, he said, take your car to Indy...

"I'd never even thought about it. As far as I was concerned, Indy was a different world, and we had our hands full trying to win grands prix. With Brabham we won the world championship in '59 and '60, but for '61 there were new rules in Formula 1, and we hadn't a hope of being competitive with Ferrari, so Jack and I decided we didn't have much to lose. Bugger it, we said, let's do it - let's go to Indy and have some fun!"

In 1961 the Monaco Grand Prix clashed not with race day at Indianapolis, but with the first qualifying weekend. "On the Thursday," Cooper said, "Jack ran at Monaco to qualify [pictured above] and then we left immediately for Indy [below] On the Saturday he qualified for the 500, and then it was police escort to the airport in Indianapolis, flight to Chicago on our sponsor's plane, then flight to Nice.

"I remember driving along the Corniche late on Sunday morning, with Jack struggling to get into clean overalls! In the race he blew up before half-distance - I don't think he was too upset..."

In the 500 Brabham, in a car way superior to the Indy roadsters in the turns but woefully down on power to them, finished ninth, not dissatisfied, but a little disappointed, for the Cooper had run in the top six for much of the day.

"We weren't too unhappy," John smiled. "We got about $9000 for finishing ninth - and at that time you got $3000 for winning a grand prix!"

Then, much more than now, there was a gulf between American and European motor racing.

"This man Lee Iacocca became the great guru of the US motor industry," said Cooper, "but I remember meeting him, in his Ford days, at Watkins Glen. 'I hear you might be coming into Formula 1,' I said, and he said, 'No, we're not interested in Formula 1 - what we're gonna do is go the whole hog on grand prix racing'. I didn't pursue it any further..."

In point of fact, Cooper was not the first F1 team to venture to the Brickyard. In 1952 Alberto Ascari skipped the Swiss Grand Prix to drive a 'Ferrari Special' at Indy, which curiously in those days was a round of the world championship, and once Cooper had swung a lamp over the 500, Colin Chapman got into it in a big way, Jimmy Clark winning the race for Lotus in 1965 - and missing the Monaco Grand Prix to do it.

Now the racing world is agog at the news that on May 28 Fernando Alonso, too, will be in Hoosierland rather than the Principality, and the attitude of many in the paddock goes a long way, I think, towards explaining why Formula 1 has for so long struggled to get a toehold in the USA.

How, they splutter, can Alonso possibly miss the sainted Monaco Grand Prix to venture into this risky, alien world?

No-one cares to be patronised, and their comments suggest that either they have no concept of what the Indianapolis 500 means or that over time they have picked up little of what makes Fernando tick.

Formula 1 may be his world, his life, but it's many years since first he told me of his wish to do Indy - and, for that matter, Le Mans - and if there's a man on earth who would instantly understand that, it is Mario Andretti, who won races in every type of car known to man.

Let's remember that in 1978, the year he won the Formula 1 world championship, Andretti also competed in every Indycar race that did not clash. With Mario it was always a matter of priorities: given that Formula 1 was his main focus at the time, he passed up the 500 in '79 because... you guessed, it clashed with Monaco.

For a long time now the two Blue Riband events have unfailingly - unfathomably - been run the same weekend, and, having concluded after the 2013 race that 47 Monaco Grands Prix were probably enough for anyone, I will again be at the Speedway this year, fascinated to see how the world's most complete racing driver copes with a wholly new environment.

Alonso is right when he says that Ron Dennis would never have countenanced his missing Monaco - let alone doing Indy - and I find it wonderfully refreshing that in Zak Brown McLaren now has a man, like Cooper and Chapman, with the vision to think beyond the suffocating confines of the Formula 1 box.

It's a fact that Monaco, where Alonso has always excelled, presents probably McLaren's best opportunity of the year to pick up good points, and this will not have escaped Brown.

But it's undeniable, too, that putting this deal together, allowing Fernando to realise one of his ambitions, can only give him a lift at a difficult time - a time when Zak and his colleagues are desperate not to lose him at the end of the year.

Were Honda's power unit even close to the pace, Alonso would never have contemplated missing a grand prix, but this year the circumstances - as with Cooper and Brabham 56 years ago - lend themselves to lateral thinking, and at Indy Fernando will at least have a competitive Honda engine at his back.

This should - if perhaps only temporarily - do wonders for his morale. While the Bahrain Grand Prix, a superbly tense affair, came down to yet another two-hander between Vettel and Hamilton, Alonso spent his afternoon scrapping, as fiercely as ever, with Jolyon Palmer's Renault and Marcus Ericsson's Sauber.

"I never raced with less power in my life!" he exclaimed on the radio. For one afternoon at least, at Indianapolis, he won't have that problem.