INDIANAPOLIS – Zak Brown has always said that bringing McLaren Racing over here as a full time entrant in the NTT IndyCar Series was intriguing. They wanted to have a larger presence in North America and what better way to do so than running more.

“That was a big contributor to this decision on the automotive side,” Brown said of the decision to move to a full time entry for next season. “North America is one of the biggest markets for (the) automotive business, as is for (McLaren) Applied Technology. This works for McLaren Racing and our other entities, which was a big, big part of our decision here.”

But, in order to do that, they wanted to take baby steps first.

In 2017, they brought Fernando Alonso over here for an Indy 500 try. It was largely successful. They paired with Andretti Autosport and Alonso was quick out of the gates. He qualified fifth and led some laps in the big race before his engine let go towards the end. The chase for the triple crown continued.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out to come back in 2018 so 2019 was the new goal. There was even speculation that a full time entrant in 2019 could be a possibility as well. But, the ugly split with Honda on the F1 side made it a difficult deal to accomplish.

The team would have liked to partner with Andretti Autosport but Honda said no. In fact, they weren’t able to work with any Honda team for that matter. That left them scrambling for the few Chevrolet teams that were in the paddock to merge with. The only ones that made sense was Carlin but even that relationship wasn’t all that secure.

So 2019 was going to be just an Indy 500 one-off. With how competitive this field is these days and how quickly they had to put this together, it was a failure from the get go. See, in 2017, all McLaren and Alonso had to do was just show up – Andretti had it figured out from there. Now, it was all on their own. Everything was a mess.

Brown, admits that mistakes were made – a lot of them. That’s why they had such a desire to not only come back to Indy in 2020 but to be a full time team. He knows that the only way to be successful in such a strong series is to be there every race. He wasn’t going to run a hide after failing to make the Indy 500 with one of the best drivers in the world. They could have never came back and left as an embarrassment. But, McLaren isn’t about that. They want to prove that they belong here but the only way to do so is to come full time and do this right.

“We certainly made a lot of mistakes in Indianapolis this year, and as I told everyone on the racing team, mistakes are okay as long as you learn from them and you don’t make the same one twice,” Brown said on Monday. “We always had a desire to compete on a full-time basis, and the way we did it in 2019 was kind of the start of ramping up. However, it’s very obvious that that’s not the right way to do it.

“So what we are able to put in place for Sam (Schmidt) will give us that full-time presence; will give us that platform to ensure that we’re competitive and don’t repeat the mistakes we made, which really was showing up with a part-time effort and a part-time crew that worked extremely hard.

“But Indianapolis is a tough place to show up for anybody on a part-time basis, and so what we structured here with Sam we think ticks a lot of the boxes of the technical aspects and the commercial aspects that enabled us to go ahead and commit.

“I think the view of my board was either let’s be all-in or all-out, and all the reasons we have wanted to do IndyCar the last couple years, have remained, regardless of our defeat at Indianapolis. We’re racers, so you’re going to hit the wall every once in a while. You have to dust yourself off and go back at it.”