Will Alonso's Indy failure end the age of versatility?

This has been a golden age for top-line motorsport stars showing versatility. Two of the last four Le Mans 24 Hours have been won by cars featuring full-time Formula 1 racers in their line-up. Two of the current F1 grid have been full-time World Rally Championship drivers. Next weekend, a MotoGP title contender will stand in for an F1 test driver in Audi's DTM line-up. The current F1 world champion is desperate to try a MotoGP bike.

Blinkered one-trick ponies? Not the class of the late '10s.

And yet the absence of Fernando Alonso and McLaren from the starting grid at last weekend's Indianapolis 500 is a warning.

So far, the message to the rest of the F1 field from Alonso's extracurricular exploits has been 'Look beyond F1! You too could win Le Mans and a sportscar world title, and fight for Indy 500 victory in your spare time!'. But this month, that message is 'Look beyond F1! You too could lose qualifying battles against Pippa Mann and Kyle Kaiser!'.

Part of the reason Alonso and McLaren's 2019 Indy 500 failure felt so seismic is Alonso's habit of making his career decisions into swashbuckling heroic quests - a trait that is genuinely admirable, but can set him up for a fall.

Moving back to McLaren in F1 was portrayed as a mission to revive a fallen giant and start a new era for past-great Honda. Looking towards IndyCar, the World Endurance Championship and more was a quest to revive the spirit of the Triple Crown and then to make up for his talent/number-of-F1-titles disparity by proving his indisputable greatness via success in a litany of great races and categories.

By contrast, Kimi Raikkonen's 2010/11 move into the WRC (with a bit of NASCAR Trucks on the side) primarily happened because he fancied going rallying when his F1 options weren't looking great. And his trip down the grid to Alfa Romeo for '19 has happened because he fancied staying in F1 and thought being with a smaller team racing in the tighter midfield might be fun - which is certainly how it's proving to be so far now he's away from the Ferrari spotlight.

A partnership with Alonso and McLaren's combined pedigree should never have been anywhere near Indy 500 non-qualification, but the margin by which they were bumped was ultimately very small - just 0.019mph across a four-lap average.

'Fine margins'. It's a tediously overused phrase in modern motorsport, and it's not an especially sexy one either. But it's absolutely true that with technological and human performance evolution, grids have become closer and success in new championships has become more about mastering specialist intricacies and nuances than hopping into an unfamiliar car and relying on pure driving talent.

Deficits of series knowledge that could be overcome with more improvisational oversteer and bravery for the F1 greats who filled their spare weekends with sportscar, touring car, Formula 5000 or Formula 2 races in the 1950-70s are more costly and harder to overcome now. A team as embattled as Kaiser's Juncos Racing squad going into an Indy 500 bump day 50 years ago would not have been a mere half a second per lap off the pole pace. Mario Andretti's 1969 Indy 500 race winning margin was just under two minutes - over no lesser rival than Dan Gurney.

Human beings have simply become better at motorsport and the technology and preparation required to excel at it. Specialisms are now more specialist. McLaren chief Zak Brown felt the biggest thing that went wrong with the Indy 500 bid was that the team wasn't ready to start testing the second the track opened for its first preparatory run at Texas Motor Speedway in April. It couldn't afford to let the teams that had all the data and experience it lacked add to their advantage at all. It allowed a 'fine margin' to open up, and couldn't recover - partly because of how it compounded its problems with further organisational miscues.

F1 may be the pinnacle, but that doesn't mean everything outside is amateur in comparison

The names being called up to fill teams' additional Indy 500 seats or to drive for the one-off squads were overwhelmingly drivers with relevant oval experience. The likes of JR Hildebrand, Conor Daly, Mann and Sage Karam have become a pool of trustworthy Indy 'ringers' that are more appealing for a team than taking a chance on someone less experienced or from another racing world. They have the data bank on how to make an IndyCar go fast around Indianapolis Motor Speedway both alone and in traffic.

The magic of Alonso's initial Indy 500 entry and Toyota WEC programme were that he wasn't heading that way as a retirement alternative, and he wasn't a talented driver choosing to change course early in his career because F1 opportunities had dried up. He was racing full-time in F1 at the same time, doing his utmost to drag McLaren forward in 2018, but willing to expand his horizons - in an extremely committed, far from half-hearted, manner - alongside that. It was hugely admirable.

But that was a lot more viable when he was plugging into a multiple Indy 500 winning team such as Andretti Autosport in 2017, for an event with ample practice time (if your car is ready...) such as Indy, and with experienced, proven team-mates all around him. Endurance racing with a manufacturer that will go endurance testing and offers a similar pool of proven category aces as team-mates was a similarly viable option for both Nico Hulkenberg at Porsche in '15 and Alonso with Toyota now. The time and resources to nail those 'fine margins' was available.

To think that even a multiple F1 world champion could walk straight into sportscar-land and get their head around LMP1 variant energy recovery systems, the challenges of finetuning a car for multiple drivers' set-ups and handling multi-class traffic sufficiently to be on a par with the existing WEC stars would be as arrogant as expecting to nail oval racing's nuances when underprepared. F1 may be the pinnacle, but that doesn't mean everything outside is amateur in comparison - and there has always been a percentage of those urging F1 drivers to race elsewhere who appear to think that's the case and that the big prizes in wider motorsport are there for the taking.

Raikkonen and Robert Kubica were fast in WRC cars, but they never had the mileage and longevity there to become genuinely good in rallying. The modern WRC requires time for drivers to build experience, learn stages, finetune their notes, and develop the confidence to keep their foot in when mistakes can be punished so violently in this gloriously raw form of motorsport.

Of the current WRC title contenders, even Sebastien Ogier had a very wobbly stage early in his initial Citroen stint after winning the Junior title, and Thierry Neuville had the same in his own Citroen spell and another major slump at Hyundai in 2015. Ott Tanak's original WRC boss Malcolm Wilson could easily have lost count of how many times he sacked or demoted the Estonian before things clicked and he blossomed into the super-fast winning machine he's been since mid-'17. It could be at least three years yet before we can say with any confidence whether current young sensations Kalle Rovanpera and Oliver Solberg are on an Ogier-style future champion career path or a Mads Ostberg style 'promise unfulfilled' path. And they were pretty much rallying before they could walk, almost literally in Rovanpera's case.

Alonso hasn't shown any WRC leanings just yet, but he has tested Dakar Rally machinery and remaining in the Toyota fold post-WEC suggests that's an option he's taking seriously. Yet WRC legend Sebastien Loeb still hasn't managed to convert his skill from rally's shorter, sharper arena to Dakar victory despite all the speed he's shown in rally raids.

And Alonso's social media mischief with Jimmie Johnson has so far only translated to a road course test in a NASCAR Chevrolet. Drivers with oval expertise as strong as Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Sam Hornish Jr couldn't fully conquer NASCAR, and neither could someone with Marcos Ambrose's mastery of big saloons. A lot of expertise in drafting and big-pack aero behaviour would have to be accumulated before an Alonso could hold their own in the sprint for a Daytona 500 victory. And the actual Alonso is wise not to have jumped that way prematurely.

Brown has mooted a Bathurst 1000 outing for Alonso, but again, here, just as Ambrose's Supercars skill didn't translate to the NASCAR ovals, every 'outsider' who's walked into Australia's top championship in recent years has been crushed by those who grew up on those quirky circuits and can get the fine margins (there it is again) out of those unique touring cars in those ultra-close qualifying battles.

Alonso's unhappy May in 2019 is a reminder of just how tough it really is to thrive against the specialists on someone else's turf in the modern era

So, what Alonso - whose racing diary is currently officially empty after next month's Le Mans - does or doesn't do next could have quite a bearing on whether the current generation continues to be a bunch of category-hopping experimenters or if the habits of the '90s and '00s, when F1 drivers tended to be solely F1 drivers, become the norm again.

The motorsport world is definitely a better place when drivers want to expand their horizons, challenge themselves and bring new audiences with them to the fantastic categories that exist outside F1.

But Alonso's unhappy May in 2019 is a reminder of just how tough it really is to thrive against the specialists on someone else's turf in the modern era.

So please, current F1 drivers, do fill your weekends between grands prix with rallying, touring car, sportscar, rallycross, electric or even two-wheeled adventures. But don't underestimate how good your specialist opposition will be, and do make sure your team's not missing its spare car because it was the wrong shade of orange.