MEDLAND: Bridging the divide

RACER.com's F1 writer Chris Medland swapped hats last week and made his first visit to Indianapolis Motor Speedway – indeed, his first visit to any IndyCar event - to soak up some of the Alonso excitement. He's currently tangled up in what he describes as "a huge travel nightmare" involving rental cars running out of gas and consequent missed flights while making his way from Indy to Monaco for this weekend's Grand Prix.

I arrived at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway feeling a little bit of trepidation when it came to broaching the subject of Fernando Alonso with IndyCar drivers. Those who race Stateside all year long and fight for the IndyCar championship as well as the Indy 500 were getting bombarded with questions about the Spaniard, and I didn't want to seem ignorant to their own qualities and value to the event.

But there's no getting away from the huge interest Alonso has brought to Indy, with fans crowding the garage of the No.29 car at IMS. That interest is a far cry from the scene outside James Hinchcliffe's garage as we sit uninterrupted on his golf cart for a long chat during practice week, but the Canadian's initial reaction to the stir caused immediately puts my mind at ease.

"It's awesome, I'm jealous," he says.

"When you think back to your racing hero as a kid, he was probably a guy like Mario Andretti or Jim Clark who got to race in a bunch of different cars all over the world all year long, won in everything and was just a badass. The sport has evolved - and it's nobody's fault, it's just the way of the world - that doesn't happen anymore. You pick your genre, you stick to it until you're either kicked out or you decide you want to change.

"Then you can go from here to sportscars or some guys have tried the stock car route or whatever, but nobody gets to do it all at the same time anymore."

Hinchcliffe is clearly a fan of Alonso, but the 2016 Indy 500 pole sitter is also pleased with what his arrival - and the excitement it has created - says about the race itself.

"The fact that we've got a guy who is not just in the conversation, he's probably the conversation for greatest living racing drivers. If you were to poll fellow drivers globally, his name would come up probably more often than anybody else's.

"Missing their hallmark event [Monaco], which in a very unique set of circumstances is the event where he's most likely to get a good result based on the team and the car, the fact that he's willing to miss that shows how important this race is to people who haven't even done it. It shows the pull that this event has on motorsports fans and racers globally."

Alonso - who will start Sunday's race from fifth place - has already said he is likely to return to Indy in order to try and win the 500 if he fails to do so this year, but the example of F1 drivers racing competitively elsewhere are few and far between. Nico Hulkenberg successfully did so at Le Mans in 2015 (BELOW), and Hinchcliffe is hoping more follow suit.

"The fact [Alonso's] team let him do it is mind-boggling for so many reasons. But it's awesome, I hope this really sets the trend. Obviously there's not going to be a lot of situations where guys can miss a race, but if there's a championship where there's a gap and you have an off week, come and race Watkins Glen or whatever. I love that, I think it's amazing. I think the fact that we've got one of the best of the best from the pinnacle of motorsports coming here to do it, it will hopefully open a lot of guys' eyes and open a lot of doors."

An obvious question to ask Hinchcliffe - even before Alonso's qualifying performance - is: "Can he win?"

"Absolutely," he says. "Alexander Rossi won as an F1 rookie on the very same team one year ago. Anybody can win this race, that's what's so cool about it."

But in that answer, Hinchcliffe flags up a problem. This is a one-way street for many drivers. One-off appearances are so rare in F1, with replacements coming from a team's existing driver line-up or being drafted in for financial reasons, a la Rossi at Manor in late 2015.

When asked if he would like to go the other way and take part in an F1 race, the 30-year-old Canadian starts off with an assured response before reality tempers his enthusiasm.

"Absolutely. There aren't a lot of events in F1 where guys get one-off deals, so it's a little bit of a different landscape, but I would just love to test one, to be honest. I've made my career over here, I'm happy with that, I love the racing over here.

"Racing in F1 is such a unique thing. As a guy that's been at the top level of a competitive series for so long, I don't know if I could go to a place where I knew that 12th was the best I was going to do every morning. I'd find it really hard to motivate [myself] to do that, and that's why the IndyCar series is such an amazing series for me. Any given weekend, any guy can win. The first race of the season, the guy from the smallest-budgeted team won from last on the grid. That's awesome."

Ross Brawn has already mooted the idea of non-championship races, and perhaps that is the sort of change in landscape that F1 would need to allow a driver from another series to make a one-off appearance. Ultimately, in order to make an Alonso-esque switch in the opposite direction more attractive to more drivers, Hinchcliffe believes the sport itself needs to become more competitive at the front.

"At least in F1 we've got two teams that can win races this year. I find myself infinitely more interested than I was last year – and it's still only four guys! I would love to try it, if there was a way to do a race, absolutely.

"There's some stock car stuff I'd love to do. I've been doing some sportscar stuff (including this year's Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, ABOVE), I want to do more of that. I got to do an Aussie V8 race a couple of years ago, I'd love to go back and do more of that - that was probably some of the most fun racing I've ever done! I'm one of those guys, I'm a racer. If it's got four wheels and an engine, chuck me in it. Let's go."

Alonso has started the debate and will have piqued the interest of a number of IndyCar drivers. Clearly IndyCar needed a big story this year to follow the 100th running of the Indy 500, and the counterargument is whether F1 needs to go down such a path or not.

If Liberty Media are looking to expand in North America, they could do worse than finding a way of attracting the Indy 500 winner to race in a grand prix. But such a scenario is a long, long way off.

Then again, who would have foreseen Fernando Alonso skipping the Monaco Grand Prix to race at Indianapolis?