Alonso a step further away from Indy 500 start

Cape Town - Ed Carpenter Racing has turned down Fernando Alonso's offer to race for the team at the iconic Indianapolis 500 racing event.

Team owner Ed Carpenter confirmed that a representative of Alonso had approached him with an offer to race for the team in the event in May, but that he isn’t willing to add a fourth entry to his team.

Alonso already hit a major snag in his efforts to appear at Indy 500 with his Andretti Autosport deal falling through due to his infamous “GP2 engine” comments aimed at Honda during his F1 days.

The Japanese manufacturer refuse to power him in the Indy 500, so the Spaniard is now restricted to those teams running Chevrolet engines.

Speaking to NBCSports.com, Carpenter said: “We are a two-car team, if we doubled the size of our team for May, it wouldn’t be good for everybody.

“What would it take to consider four cars? Money, people and time.”

Alonso maintains that his criticism of Honda’s engine was supposed to be a private conversation with his engineer and not to be broadcasted to the public.

But either way it was, and Carpenter expressed his surprise that Alonso’s proposed Andretti deal got so far down the line before the plug was pulled.

“It had happened before.

“The difference is Fernando is separated from McLaren,” he said.

“It was pretty surprising they got that far down the road before they realised it was going to become an issue with how public that dispute had become.”

The new Arrow McLaren SP outfit had been the most obvious destination for Alonso, but that also is now surely off the table with the 38-year-old no longer serving as a McLaren ambassador.

Alonso did confirm recently that he is open to an F1 return in 2021.

- TEAMTalk Media