LONG BEACH, Calif – Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren Racing is here on hand for the NTT IndyCar Series race weekend in Long Beach. The reason Brown is in Long Beach is simple – Fernando Alonso tested an Indy Car at Texas earlier this week and this is the last race before the Month of May in Indianapolis.

McLaren, will field car for Alonso in the 103rd Running of the Indianapolis 500 next month.

Brown, says that while they’re excited to join the series on a one-off effort in May, that their second venture in the last three years comes with more pressure and anxiety than the last.

“2017 was easy because Michael (Andretti) did the majority of the work and has got a lot of experience, and we knew we’d be putting Fernando (Alonso) into a great race car,” said Brown on Saturday morning. “And it was in a short period of time.

“So this time is a totally different experience. This is a full McLaren effort. We’re getting some assistance from Carlin, but that is more operational, giving Fernando some teammates, some data sharing, things of that nature, which is good, because being a one-car team, you can get lost around Indianapolis. We need some kind of support and some element of having some teammates come the month of May. So this is a big undertaking.

“We announced it in I think it was October, and it seems like time has flown, and we’ve needed every single one of those days because we’re still working very hard and just keeping our head down, getting ready for April 24th, and just going to try and kind of creep up on it.”

He’s right in a sense that they did have five other cars of data for Alonso to look at. That season, Ryan Hunter-Reay, Alexander Rossi, Marco Andretti, Takuma Sato and Jack Harvey were all teammates of Alonso’s at Indy. Plus, they had the cars to beat. Sato, ended up winning the race outright with Andretti taking three of the top eight finishing positions.

This year, he teams with Carlin who’s only entering the Indy 500 the second time themselves. With Max Chilton, Charlie Kimball and Pato O’Ward as Carlin’s entrants, Alonso and McLaren have a much steeper hill to climb in terms of getting up to speed next month.

Despite that, Brown says that there really wasn’t any discussion about having a second car at their disposal to team with Alonso.

“No, we never really considered two cars,” said Brown. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve created an association with Carlin. As we know, one car, you just have one data point, and now we’ll have three or four data points. So we haven’t considered one car for this year — or two cars I should say. We knew one car was going to be a big enough of a task, and so we wanted to focus on that.”

What about the future? There was speculation that McLaren could run a full season in 2019 with Alonso behind the wheel. While the deadline came and passed, it doesn’t mean the door is shut for the future. In fact, it appears that a McLaren entry on a full time basis is coming soon.

“Yeah, so (NTT) IndyCar (Series), we’re a big fan of the racing series,” said Brown on the terms of a full time entrant. “I think Mark Miles and team have done an excellent job. The racing is outstanding. Great teams, great drivers, great venues. So it’s a place that McLaren would like to race.

“We’ve been very focused on Formula 1, and we remain very focused on Formula 1, but I’ve now completed the hiring of the balance of the leadership for the Formula 1 team now that James Key has started as technical director and Andreas Seidl is the managing director of the Formula 1 team. He’ll join next month, and so we really needed to get that completed. And so going ahead and getting the equipment, making the investment in doing Indianapolis this year in the way we are is another step in that direction.

“There is no doubt that the shareholders at McLaren would like to be in INDYCAR. I think it’s more of a when than an if, and if we were to do it for 2020, I think you’d need to make that decision in the summer in order to be properly prepared. So it’s nothing that we’ve ruled out for 2020, and that decision will come sometime in the summer, and if not then, then we’ll look towards 2021.”

McLaren used to be over here in the 1970’s. The first year was actually 1970 itself in the Indy 500. They came back on a part time basis in 1971 with more races than just Indy. They took even more races in 1972 and by 1973, they were full time.

Johnny Rutherford gave them their first win in Ontario in 1973. A year later, he won four races including the Indy 500. Overall, they won 18 times including two Indy 500’s. They left after 1979 and didn’t return until 2017 with Alonso.

Now, it sounds by 2021 they’ll be back full time and with what Brown says will “definitely be a two car team.”