Why Alonso risks underestimating the Indy 500

Fernando Alonso taking on the Indianapolis 500 was the last thing I was expecting. But it could be an even harder challenge than he is anticipating.

It's very easy to underestimate the Indianapolis 500. After all, the track is just two long straights connected by four corners, right?

No, because even as an engineer it can so easily knock your confidence. And when you lose your confidence to alter the car set-up to suit the conditions, you lose the ability to be more competitive.

Having worked as the engineer on one of these cars at Indy, as I was in 1986 when I worked for Galles Racing and its three-car entry for Roberto Moreno, Pancho Carter and Geoff Brabham (pictured below), I can tell you it's a lot harder than it looks.

As an engineer, you actually feel like you are in the car with a driver at Indianapolis. You can time it in your head so well that you feel you are turning the car into the corner with them.

Most people assume you just drive down the front straight at 235mph, turn left and the car goes round a turn four times a lap. But every one of those corners is different on every lap to the extent that the 800 corners in the race are all a white-knuckle ride of their own. If you underestimate what Indy requires, you can very quickly end up in hospital.

During practice, it's important to keep your feet on the ground. Overconfidence can easily lead to a scrape with the wall, and if you have one of those coming up to qualifying it can set you back when it comes to the grid-deciding days.

When a rookie arrives at Indianapolis, the first thing they want to do is set fast lap times. But, in reality, that is the easy bit. The clever drivers and teams know that building up to speed slowly and carefully is the most important thing.

Once you get through rookie orientation, which is basically about running at a reasonable speed with consistency and should be no problem for Alonso, and then go out and do a few 200mph+ laps just to know what it's like, you have to concentrate on the nasty bit. This is running in traffic with only inches (it is America, after all) separating the cars. Coming to terms with this early will make or break Alonso's weekend.

As qualifying approaches, you can start to turn up the wick. If the car has a good balance, you can reduce downforce, which in turn reduces drag to give you that very important extra speed. This is where the team comes into it more than the driver.

If the car can be trimmed out and the balance retained, then the only difference the driver will feel is the extra corner-entry speed and the loss of grip mid-corner. If the confidence is there, they will keep the throttle pegged. If not and they get a bit of a wobble on, then qualifying can turn into a nightmare.

The Brickyard is a lot safer now than when I was doing it, but an airborne accident can turn into a plane crash, with the driver a helpless passenger. The one thing any experienced oval driver will tell you is not to correct too much if the car oversteers, as when the front-end bites it will take you head-on into the wall at an enormous speed. Let it spin and you will usually brush the wall with no great damage other than to the car.

But then again, as in all areas of life it's all about decisions. If 'spin-and-win' Danny Sullivan hadn't corrected his car from an oversteer in 1985, he wouldn't have won the Indy 500. I watched from that corner and it was impressive, but it was a one-off and I think luck played a big part in it. Most of the other incidents took their toll, usually on the legs of the driver.

The conditions change around the circuit dramatically throughout a race that lasts three hours or more. Although you get lots of running, a total of nine days of practice if you include qualifying, it is at different times of day and the danger is that it can just confuse you.

The grip level can be transformed by one degree of track temperature change, or a change in wind speed of 1mph. Then there's the traffic; well, that's a whole different ball game to the difficulties you have with other cars in F1.

Running on your own in qualifying, as you do, is fine. Only the track temperature and wind direction will alter the car balance. But as we have seen many times at Indy, those four laps of qualifying, which are averaged out to set your overall speed, can be the loneliest you have ever driven in a racing car.

If the balance is not correct, the lap time just won't be there. If you try to force it to overcome the problem, you risk the car heading back on a wrecker truck, and you might well be heading off in an ambulance to the Methodist Hospital in downtown Indianapolis.

In the race, it's a very different deal. At the start, if you qualify in the midfield, you are in a queue of 15-20 cars all ducking and diving for position. So managing the traffic is what it's all about, and managing others' enthusiasm to win the race well before the last lap is vital. It's very easy to get wiped out by another driver getting too over-excited to know what's going on around them at that moment in time.

When you get in that queue of cars, initially you get a massive tow and lose front-end grip. After that, the air actually starts to swirl around the track and the top speeds of the cars increase to a level that makes entering the corners a new experience. Because of the drag reduction, you also have an overall downforce reduction that means that cars have less overall grip.

You need to be disciplined enough to make sure your practice running is at a representative time of day for both qualifying and the race and that, from a driver's point of view, you experience all of these scenarios prior to the race start. That allows you to give the team immediate feedback to the balance adjustments required to cover the differing situations.

Being part of a six-car Andretti Autosport team is going to be a completely new experience for Alonso. Over the last few years, he has been pampered to a level that means this will be a real eye opener. Yes, the car will be a McLaren entry and I'm sure it will be very orange, but there are five other drivers in that team all trying to win the biggest race in America. Two of them - Ryan Hunter-Reay and Alexander Rossi - are already Indy 500 winners.

As Mario Andretti said about his son Michael's team's philosophy, the data will be shared between the drivers and engineers. But it is what you have left in the toolbox for just before qualifying or for that last race pitstop that can make or break your race. The confident, more experienced, drivers will keep something back for just that moment.

They will have experience both at Indy and in oval racing in general and they will be keeping a lot of it to themselves. The last thing any of them wants is for the upstart Alonso to turn up and make them look bad.

Don't get me wrong, Alonso has the talent and, if he has a little bit of luck, he will do a good job. But the days of winning Indy as a one-off race are long gone. For Andretti Autosport, putting together a team of high-level mechanics and engineers for this one race will not be easy. It's very difficult at the best of times, but doing it for Indy when many teams are expanding is doubly difficult.

Winning Indy is all about one thing: being in contention when the last round of pitstops starts to unfold. This is going to be in the last 35 laps of the race. Prior to that, it's about survival, getting confidence in the car to use the full track width, adapting to the conditions and being able to read the race to alter the balance to suit the situation you will face in the last 10 laps.

That's when it's all about lighting the blue touch paper, half-closing your eyes and keeping that throttle pegged when the others around you are feathering it that little bit.

Whoever has the fuel, tyres and balance to run flat out from the last pitstop to the flag usually ends up drinking the milk. However, sometimes it can come down to an economy run, as with Rossi's victory last year when he had not been in the fight at the front through the whole race.

So that's the challenge Alonso faces. But while I can understand why a driver in a car that isn't competitive would want to jump into one that is, it's still a surprise given he's so hungry for that third F1 world title.

What I don't understand is why he would do it now and why McLaren would let it happen. The McLaren-Honda partnership is hanging on a very thin thread and now is the time that stability can make a huge difference to how everyone reacts to the problems.

We've been hearing for far too long that Honda is the future for McLaren, and it will probably have to be because McLaren using the Mercedes power unit just won't beat Mercedes at its own game. Mercedes just understands how to get the best from the power unit better than any of its customers.

Alonso is missing Monaco to race at Indy. Monaco is a race requiring total commitment, total focus and, above all, respect. For any driver it's the biggest challenge of the season. With the new rules and higher-grip cars in 2017, this is going to be an all-new rollercoaster ride.

Multiply the previous commitment by 10 and you might be getting somewhere near where it is now. I thought Alonso would be up for taking this opportunity. He could wrestle something out of a recalcitrant McLaren-Honda package.

Jenson Button lives around the corner, so he was the obvious choice to fill in by replacing one past world champion with another. He can just pop in, drive around for a few laps and then head straight home if something goes wrong.

Personally, I would like see the motorsport world preventing clashes between the Indy 500, the Le Mans 24 Hours and any of the F1 races. These are big events and it would be great to see drivers taking part in all three. When Nico Hulkenberg won Le Mans in 2015 driving for Porsche with Nick Tandy and Earl Bamber, it was a great story and told us a lot about the level of competition in each championship.

As for Alonso and the Indy 500, that's a very different kettle of fish to Hulkenberg jumping in and racing at Le Mans. I'm not saying Alonso can't be in the mix at the front, but Indianapolis is a race that looks so simple when, in reality, it couldn't be more complicated.

That's why it's so easy to underestimate, even for a man as sharp as Alonso.