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Magician Fernando Alonso must pull off his greatest trick to master Indy500
He is quite the amateur magician on the quiet, Fernando Alonso. A favourite pastime in his Formula One motorhome is to impress friends, corporate guests and even the odd passing journalist with his slick conjuring tricks, which include multiple three-card sleights of hand.
The passion was imparted by his uncle and he has since acquired a degree of talent that could rival that of fellow world champion Nigel Mansell, a fully-fledged member of the Magic Circle, who once held shows where he would use a stacked deck to make correct deductions of audience members’ telephone numbers.
By far Alonso’s greatest act of sorcery, though, would be to pull off a victory in Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, a veritable symphony of chaos at 230mph. For all that his F1 mastery should prove a telling point of difference from his rivals, he is also, history would suggest, a hostage to fortune.
These 200 laps of the Brickyard derive their thrill from being perched on a ragged edge where, as France’s Sébastian Bourdais starkly demonstrated this week, the faintest feathering of the steering wheel in the wrong direction can lead to ghastly acquaintance with a concrete wall.
Mario Andretti, whose grandson Marco is on the grid alongside Alonso this weekend, had it about right. “If everything seems under control,” he once said, “you’re not going fast enough.”
