Why Alonso already looks like a sportscar great

Fernando Alonso is ready and willing for the challenge of the Le Mans 24 Hours. That much became clear long before he'd completed his final stint at the end of his run-out last weekend in the Daytona equivalent. Toyota's star signing for the 2018/19 World Endurance Championship superseason didn't look like a sportscar rookie.

It wasn't that he impressed in qualifying: he overachieved with a time less than a second off the pole at the wheel of the United Autosports Ligier-Gibson JSP217 he shared with Lando Norris and Phil Hanson. But would we have expected anything else of a two-time Formula 1 world champion who wrung the neck of an uncompetitive McLaren-Honda for three largely wasted seasons? Of course not.

Alonso wasn't at the Daytona 24 Hours to learn how to drive a racing car, even one with a roof over him and unpopular control tyres under him. He was there to get sportscar racing into his blood as he prepares to try to win Le Mans in his quest for the unofficial triple crown of motorsport.

He talked about getting experience of many of the nuances of the long-distance discipline. Alonso mentioned things like driver changes, and communication and compromise with team-mates, as well as something as simple as how much time to spend in the pits between stints. It is all very different to what he has experienced so far during his career in F1 and beforehand on the single-seater ladder.

"I was fully expecting a 'what-the-f***' moment when things were going badly, but it never came" United Autosports' Richard Dean

Alonso has clearly grasped the idea that sportscar racing is a team sport. An ability - or rather a desire - to work closely with your driving partners for the greater good of the team is crucial.

"Fernando couldn't have been more accommodating and enthusiastic, especially when it came to working with his young team-mates," says United's Richard Dean, co-owner of the team with McLaren boss Zak Brown and the man who runs it on a day-to-day basis. "I was fully expecting a 'what-the-fuck' moment when things were going badly, but it never came."

But the most significant lesson that has to be learnt by any driver swapping to what is, remember, a multi-class discipline is how to get past the slower cars while losing the least amount of time. Traffic management, they call it. And here Alonso excelled.

Dean is almost gushing in his admiration of Alonso's prowess in and around slower cars at Daytona.

"Going through traffic, he was in full-attack mode — he wasn't taking any prisoners," he says. "We had the inboard camera feed in the pits, and you could see that he was thinking two or three corners ahead. And he didn't hit anyone."

Dean is correct when he talks about such skills being the "mark of a top sportscar driver". They are what distinguish the great from the good in the modern era. Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen were masters in this respect in their pomp, something that goes a long way to explaining why they were very much in the former category. Alonso looked like he'd been ducking and diving around slower cars all his career.

A key point of the weekend for me was that Alonso continued to push, and push hard, long after his United Ligier dropped way out of contention courtesy of brake and then throttle problems. No one should have been shocked by Alonso's motivation. He has, after all, come into sportscar racing with an express target rather than as a means of continuing his career and perhaps topping up the pension.

Alonso never let his head fall at Daytona. That's another requirement of success in sportscars. He appeared as motivated late in the race as he and his team-mates nibbled their way back into the top 40 as he did early on when they were consistently running in the top five or six, and occasionally moving to the top of the leaderboard. That's a good sign for when he has to head back out onto a dark and perhaps slightly damp Circuit de la Sarthe for a fourth stint on a set of tyres and with a car not quite in the same shape in which it started the race.

There's a clear passion for racing in Alonso's mind. He gets a thrill out of driving. That's something that I had come to suspect more and more through the second McLaren-Honda era, but it became patently clear when he sat in front of the press pack at Daytona.

That probably goes some of the way to explaining why he's going to be contesting the full WEC superseason baring any date clashes with F1, which for the moment at least means skipping Toyota's home event at Fuji to race his McLaren-Renault at Austin. That and the fact that such a programme over the superseason gives him a unique double chance of winning Le Mans.

Alonso pushed for a full-season drive even though there was opposition within McLaren. Remember Eric Boullier, racing director at the team, suggesting that a dual programme in F1 and the WEC would be impossible because it would be too distracting?

But it does make sense for a driver trying to win Le Mans. Surely it's better to be fully part of the programme rather than being slotted into an existing line-up for the 24 Hours?

Better for Alonso and better for Toyota, too. Dropping a driver to make way for its star signing for Le Mans, and presumably the Spa round beforehand, wouldn't have been ideal. It would have destabilised a team that can have no excuses for failing to win Le Mans this June.

Alonso continued to push, and push hard, long after his United Ligier dropped way out of contention. He never let his head fall at Daytona

Signing Alonso is a double-edged sword for a manufacturer that has come close to notching up a first Le Mans victory three times in the past four years. He will put Toyota's sportscar campaign in the spotlight in a way it has never been before, but Alonso's name on the side of the car does come with negatives.

Who gets the headlines if the TS050 HYBRID raced by the F1 star wins Le Mans? And who gets the headlines if the team fails again? The respective answers to those questions in my mind are 'Alonso' and 'Toyota'.

But Toyota obviously feels that the PR bang Alonso will bring is worth it at a time when the WEC in general and the LMP1 class in particular need all the help they can get. As the only manufacturer left in the premier class, it knows that it needs to do everything possible to ensure the WEC stays in the public eye.

Alonso, though, isn't doing the WEC for Toyota's benefit. He's going there to win Le Mans first and foremost, and perhaps to notch up a third world title that still looks some way off in F1. But I have a sneaky feeling that his passion for motorsport has something to do with it as well.

Why else would he be talking about going back to Daytona next year? The race comes at a time when drivers are preparing for the coming season - or in Alonso's case seasons. And better, he says, to be driving a racing car than on a bike or in the gym.