Zak Brown doesn't want to make the same mistakes again in 2020

McLaren CEO Zak Brown says McLaren must learn their lessons from the IndyCar disaster after Fernando Alonso failed to qualify for the Indy500 in May 2019. Brown, who was present in America flew back to Monaco in time for the Monaco Grand Prix rather than watching his team compete. 

McLaren experienced a bounce-back season to finish in the 'best of the rest' place in the F1 world championship. While the celebrations were ongoing with the Formula 1 team, it was back to the drawing board for the IndyCar project. 

Their first attempt [in 2017] was a unique moment in modern motorsport as Alonso was a serious candidate for the win well into the race was highly admired. Nobody expected that things would go so dramatically wrong two years later.

No help from Andretti

In 2017, McLaren was connected to one of the top teams in the IndyCar. At the time, Alonso was actually just driving an Andretti car, whereas in 2019 the car had been prepared almost entirely by McLaren. 

“It was a fiasco last year, you can't run away from it. You have to learn from mistakes and not make the same mistakes again. So I would say that some of my mistakes were very stupid. In retrospect, I had certainly done all kinds of things differently," Brown said at the Autosport International Show.