McLaren seeks to overcome setbacks at Indianapolis 500 - MotorSportsTalk

INDIANAPOLIS – If Fernando Alonso and McLaren thought they got off to a slow start in Tuesday’s “Opening Day” for the 103^rdIndianapolis, then Wednesday’s second round of practice was downright miserable.

It was potentially devastating to his chances to have a competitive Indy 500 in 2019.

He lost control of his McLaren Chevrolet at 12:34 p.m. on Wednesday when it drifted high into Turn 2 and brushed the outside wall. It then rebounded across the track and slammed into the infield retaining wall.

“It was just pure understeer on the car,” Alonso explained. “Even if I lifted the throttle on the entry to the corner it was not enough. I lost completely the front aero. The wall came too close and too quickly. Unfortunately, it happened today, and we will lose a little bit of running time again. I’m sorry for the team.

“We’ll learn and come back stronger tomorrow.”

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McLaren took the damaged car back to its garage in Gasoline Alley to assess the damage. It was determined the primary car should be moved aside in favor of the backup car that was used at a recent test at Texas Motor Speedway.

McLaren IndyCar president Bob Fernley said both are McLaren-built cars, but the one that will hit the track on Thursday was built by McLaren at the Carlin Racing garages in Indianapolis.

The chassis that got damaged will be rebuilt and prepared as a spare car by Friday time, in time for this weekend’s qualifications at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Fernley confirmed the issue that sidelined the team on Tuesday was an alternator problem. According to several crewmembers, there was some debris inside the alternator that kept it from functioning properly.

“Chevy will look into that,” Fernley said.

Two full days of practice have gone by, and McLaren has yet to have more than a few hours of running time. That has set the team back in terms of preparations for this weekend’s qualifications for the 103^rdIndianapolis 500.

“You can never have enough laps,” Fernley said. “It’s not helpful in the process, but I think, unfortunately, it’s part of the Speedway program. I think we’ve reacted pretty quickly. The boys are doing a great job and we’ll be back out tomorrow.

“We definitely thought we were going to have a good run. And it was looking very good. Very steady, so it’s unfortunate.”

Unlike 2017 when McLaren formed an alliance with Andretti Autosport that gave the program a fully prepared Honda with crew and engineering support from Andretti’s IndyCar operation, this year is much different.

McLaren is attempting to create its own NTT IndyCar Series program. It is a Chevrolet operation because Honda officials in Japan prohibited Honda Performance Development (HPD) from doing business with McLaren after its Formula One team disparaged Honda’s F1 effort in 2017.

“I think this is an enormous challenge under any other circumstances,” Fernley said. “But it’s something McLaren has to do because what it’s done, it’s given them the foundation for the future.

“Working with Michael (Andretti) is fantastic, but you don’t learn anything. And that’s what you need to be able to do. In order for McLaren to take those next steps, they need the knowledge and foundation of what we’ve been doing the past few months.”

McLaren has an engineering agreement with Carlin Racing and can share data and other information, but the cars are built and prepared by McLaren.

“I don’t think we can rely on Carlin at all,” Fernley said. “They’ve got three cars to run. We have enough crew to do this ourselves.

“The Carlin part of it was mainly about logistics and helping us in the beginning, particularly with equipment. What we’ve had to do to set up a team, they did a year earlier. So, they were the nearest to what we’ve been having to do. So, they were very, very helpful.

“I think it’s slightly bigger challenge, not necessarily in terms of the organizational elements of it. The technology has moved on. All of which we expected, but all were a little more challenging than we thought it would be.”

Zak Brown, McLaren’s CEO, told NBC Sports.com in April that a full-time NTT IndyCar Series effort in 2020 depended on how well the team performed at the Indianapolis 500. If the team is able to overcome the obstacles it has been dealt in the first two days of practice, that might prove the mettle of this operation.

“I think what it will show, and I’m absolutely sure we will overcome the obstacles, is how good a little team we’ve built in a short period of time,” Brown said Wednesday. “The guys have worked incredibly hard to get it where it is today. And now they’re going to have to work very hard now to get us back on track again.

“A lot depends on how tomorrow goes. The annoying part for us is we’ve had two perfect days weather-wise, and we’ve lost a little in both those days. But it’s one of those things. You have to recover from it and get on with it. It shows the depth of the team to recover from something like this. Tomorrow we’ll brush ourselves down and start all over again.

“Every has to have one (that first hit at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway). We’re looking at it like that. It’s part of IndyCar. If it was easy, everyone would do it.”

Fernley has no doubt that once the backup car is repaired and Alonso returns to the race course on Thursday morning, he will be fully focused on getting up to speed.

“You never faze him,” Fernley said. “The beauty of it is he’ll dust himself down — of course there’s a little knock in confidence — but he’ll get a few laps under his belt and be back to normal.”

(Editor’s note: This story on the Heart of Racing sports cars shootout for women is one in an occasional Motorsports Talk series focusing on women in racing during March, which is Women’s History Month.)

Heart of Racing driver and team manager Ian James says his daughter, Gabby, isn’t so interested in auto racing. But she is interested (as a New York-based journalist) in writing about the sport’s efforts and growth in gender equality

It’s a topic that also was brought up by James’ wife, Kim.

“They’re always saying, ‘Hey, you manage all these guys, and you help them, so why not a woman?’ ” Ian James told NBC Sports. “And I feel like there are a lot of women that haven’t had a fair crack at it in sports car racing.

“Our whole DNA at Heart of Racing is we give people opportunities in all types of situations where there’s been crew personnel or drivers. And I felt like we hadn’t really addressed the female driver situation. I felt like there was a void to give somebody a chance to really prove themselves.”

During the offseason, the team took a major step toward remedying that.

*Hannah Grisham at the Heart of Racing shootout (Mike Levitt/LAT)*

Heart of Racing held its first female driver shootout last November at the APEX Motor Club in Phoenix, Arizona, to select two women who will co-drive an Aston Martin Vantage GT4 in the SRO SprintX Championship.

The season will begin this weekend at Sonoma Raceway with Hannah Grisham and Rianna O’Meara-Hunt behind the wheel. The team also picked a third driver, 17-year-old Annie Rhule, for a 2023 testing program.

The Phoenix audition included 10 finalists who were selected from 130 applicants to the program, which has been fully underwritten by Heart of Racing’s sponsors.

“We didn’t want it to be someone who just comes from a socio-economic background that could afford to do it on their own course,” James said. “We can pick on pure talent. We’re committed to three years to do this and see if we can find the right person. I’m very hopeful.”

So is Grisham, a Southern California native who has been racing since she was 6 in go-karts and since has won championships in Mazda and Miata ladder series. She has several victories in the World Racing League GP2 (an amateur sports car endurance series). The last two years, Grisham has worked as a test driver for the Pirelli tire company (she lives near Pirelli’s U.S. headquarters in Rome, Georgia, and tests about 30 times a year).

Starting with the Sonoma during SprintX event weekends (which feature races Saturday and Sunday), she will split the Heart of Racing car with O’Meara-Hunt (a New Zealand native she got to know at the shootout).

“It’s huge; the biggest opportunity I’ve had in this sport,” Grisham, 23, told NBC Sports. “Now it’s up to me to perform how I know I can. But I’m super lucky to be with such an amazing team and have a good teammate. The Heart of Racing has a family vibe and energy to it that’s really amazing. It’s super exciting. It’s hard to put into words.”

Grisham is hopeful that a strong performance eventually could lead to a full-time ride with Heart of Racing. The team has full-time entries in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and won the GTD category of the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona with the No. 27 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 piloted by James, Darren Turner, Roman DeAngelis and Marco Sorensen.

James said “there’s no guarantee” of placement in an IMSA entry for Grisham and O’Meara-Hunt, but “if they prove themselves, we’ll continue to help them throughout their career and our team. The GT3 program is an obvious home for that. If they get the opportunity and don’t quite make it, we’ll be looking for the next two. The next three years, we’ll cycle through drivers until we find the right one.”

Grisham described the two-day shootout as a friendly but intense environment. After a day of getting acclimated to their cars, drivers qualified on new tires the second day and then did two 25-minute stints to simulate a race.

*Hannah Grisham reviews data with Heart of Racing sports car driver Gray Newell during the team’s shootout last November (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

“Everyone was super nice,” she said. “Once everyone gets in the car, it’s a different level. A different switch gets turned on. Everyone was super nice; everyone was quick. I feel we had an adequate amount of seat time, which is definitely helpful.

“It’s always cool to meet more women in the sport because there’s not too many of us, even though there’s more and more. It’s always cool to meet really talented women, especially there were so many from all over the world.”

IMSA has celebrated female champions and race winners, notably Katherine Legge (who is running GTD full time this season with Sheena Monk for Gradient Racing). The field at Sebring and Daytona also included the Iron Dames Lamborghini (a female-dominated team).

*The Heart of Racing’s female driver shootout drew interested candidates from around the world (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

James believes “a breakout female driver will be competing with the best of them” in the next five years as gender barriers slowly recede in motorsports.

“It’s been a male-dominated sport,” James said. “It’s still a very minute number of women drivers compared to the guys. I’m sure back in the day there were physical hurdles about it that were judged. But now the cars are not very physical to drive, and it’s more about technique and mental strength and stuff like that, and there’s no reason a girl shouldn’t do just as well as a guy. What we’re just trying to achieve is that there isn’t an obvious barrier to saying ‘Hey, I can’t hire a guy or a girl.’ We just want to put girls in front of people and our own program that are legitimate choices going forward for people.”

“There’s been some really good female drivers, but a lot of them just haven’t been able to sustain it, and a lot of that comes from sponsorship. I think (with the shootout), there’s no pressure of raising money and worrying about crash damage. We’ve taken care of all that so they can really focus on the job at hand.”

Funding always has been a hurdle for Grisham, who caught the racing bug from her father, Tom, an off-road driver who raced the Baja 1000 several times.

“I don’t come from a lot of money by any means,” she said. “So since a young age, I’ve always had to find sponsorships and get people to help me, whether it was buying tires, paying for entry fees, paying for the shipment of a car to an actual race. Literally knocking on the doors of people or businesses in my town.

“So yeah, it’s definitely something I’ve always struggled with and held me back because the sport revolves so much around money. So again to get this opportunity is insane.”

*Rianna O’Meara-Hunt was one of two women selected by the Heart of Racing to drive in the SRO SprintX Championship this year (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

Grisham credits racing pioneer Lyn St. James (an Indy 500 veteran and sports car champion) as a role model who has helped propel her career. She was hooked by the sights, smells and sounds of racing but also its competitive fire.

“There’s a zone you get in, that subconscious state of mind when you’re driving. It’s like addictive almost. I love it. Also I’m just a very competitive person as I think most race car drivers are.

“For sure I want to stay with the Heart of Racing. Obviously, I’m still getting to know everyone, but it’s a super family vibe. That’s how I grew up in the sport with just my dad and I wrenching on the cars. That’s what I love about this sport is all the amazing people you meet. And I think this is one of the most promising teams in this country. For sure, I want to learn as much as I can from them and hopefully continue. I feel so lucky and grateful to be one of those chosen.”