McLaren Sporting Director Gil de Ferran believes it is important to avoid panicking as the team aims to recover from the setback caused by Fernando Alonso’s crash in second practice for the Indy 500.
The team lost most of the day's running after the Spaniard crashed heavily in the early part of the session, acting as a further blow to the team in the wake of Tuesday's electronic problems.
“Avoiding panic is essential to the recovery process,” the Brazilian told IndyCar.com.
“That’s literally the most important thing, we’ve been dealt a hand. These are the circumstances we have to deal with, and we have to deal with them in a calm and determined manner.
“That’s the whole thing. It happened. We have a great group of guys who are working super hard. We’ll see what happens. We’ve got to put one foot in front of the other.”
Alonso was following Graham Rahal into Turn 3 before he lost the front end and clattered the outside SAFER barrier; the #66 car then spun and slid into the inside of Turn 4 before hitting the outside wall again, causing heavy damage.
Alonso, who ended the day in 29th place with a best average lap speed of 225.433mph said: “I lost completely the front aero. The wall came too close and too quickly.
“Unfortunately, it happened. We will lose a little bit of running time again. I’m sorry for the team, but we will learn and hopefully, we will come back stronger.”
De Ferran also said they had yet to decide whether the team will switch to their back-up car which has been prepared by its technical partner, Carlin, at a workshop in Florida.
“You never want to plan for a crash, but in a way, you have to,” de Ferran added. “We tried to the best we could to have both cars as well prepared as we could, coming into the month of May.
“It’s been a tremendous amount of work by everyone coming into this month. We have a clear direction of where we need to take the setup of the car.”
Discussion about this post