Alonso First Outing in Indycar “Perfect”

Fernando Alonso speaks out about his first stint in the Andretti Autosport #29, hailing his test run as a perfect outing.

In what should come as a surprise to no one, Formula One’s Fernando Alonso has turned in his first batch of laps around the oval in and IndyCar, and passed with flying colors. Alonso has undoubtedly shown once more what sort of performance he’s capable of putting out when given the right package. He completed 55 laps inside of the Dallara DW12 and averaged a peak speed of 219.654mph around the oval. Despite barreling around a concrete deathtrap for several hours, the grizzled Spaniard looks back on his first stint as a “fun” experience, and is eager to taste some more of Indy:

“It was fun. I think it’s a good way to start to build the speed. It was probably a little bit difficult at the beginning to reach the minimum, but in the next stages I felt good.

Hopefully we can put some laps now and start feeling the car a little bit because at the moment the car is driving itself. I’m not driving the car. We are already with 40 laps in my pocket so you are able to fine-tune the lines a little bit and up-shifts and down-shifts, which gear to use in which corner.

At the moment, everything looks good but now the real thing starts. So far it has been good. The team was amazingly helpful. Running alone is quite okay, but we’ll see later over the next weeks.” – Fernando Alonso

Alonso’s single car test was watched on live stream by over 2 million fans. As is often the case in the World of Motorsports, a lone-run at a circuit is very much a far cry from the reality of sharing the track with scores of other drivers at speeds above 200 MPH. How Fernando will manage to handle himself when things get dicey is up in the air, but the man is still very much at the time of his game – and Indy could be his moment to shine in 2017.