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McLaren and Alonso will use Chevy engines at Indy 500

Fernando Alonso will have a Chevrolet engine in his McLaren when the double Formula One champion attempts to win next year's Indianapolis 500 in his second attempt, the British team announced on Tuesday. The 37-year-old Spaniard led 27 laps last year on his debut at The Brickyard in a Honda-powered Andretti Autosport car before retiring with an engine problem with 21 laps to go. The 2018 Indy 500 winner, Australian Will Power, won with Chevrolet-powered Team Penske last May. "Having Chevrolet power behind me means we're putting ourselves in the best possible position to compete at the front," said Alonso in a McLaren statement. The double Monaco Grand Prix winner, who won the Le Mans 24 Hours with Toyota this year, left Formula One at the end of the season last month and is targeting Indianapolis as the final part of the "Triple Crown of Motorsport": winning the Formula One championship (or Monaco), Le Mans and the Indy 500. The late Briton Graham Hill, also a two-times Formula One champion who died in 1975, is the only one to have done it, completing the triple in 1972.Reporting by Alan BaldwinRelated Video: Motorsports Chevrolet McLaren Racing Vehicles IndyCar

McLaren Senna LM gets a video walkaround

At the end of last year, rumor got out that 26 units of the McLaren Senna production run were still waiting their turn to impress the world. Word was that McLaren Special Operations would remake the roughly two dozen coupes into three special editions, the most numerous of them a Senna LM model. A finished example of the predicted coupe found its way to New Zealand, where McLaren Auckland Brand Manager Luke Neuberger gave the Payapa Orange supercar a walkaround for YouTube channel Giltrap TV. The English carmaker recently launched its 720S Le Mans as a tribute to winning — and hoarding four of the top five finishing positions at —  Le Mans in 1995 with the F1 GTR. That coupe got dressed in McLaren orange with Ueno Grey accents and five-spoke wheels recalling the OZ Racing rims on the F1 GTR, as well as vented front fenders, a roof scoop, and gold-painted brake calipers. MSO went further with the Senna LM, which is natural considering the Senna homage is reputed to cost about $1.7 million, compared to the 720S homage starting at $299,000. The Senna LM bodywork hasn't changed in front from the standard Senna, but the Auckland example wears a uniform color all over; the front fascia of a standard Senna sports black accents in the headlight pockets. Body-colored vents adorn the front fenders above a set of gray five-spoke wheels, and one of the many tiny particluars on the Senna LM sees the center-lock wheel nuts colored red on the left side, blue on the right. Behind those wheels, gold calipers clamp vented discs. As we saw in a spy shot of an early mule left in an industrial unit, the clear pane in the doors is filled in with a body-colored panel. Further back, the glossy carbon fiber wing endplates feature the initials "LM" carved out to show unfinished carbon fiber.  Neuberger wouldn't confess to a horsepower rating beyond "800-ish," but MSO worked on the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8. The track-only Senna GTR makes 814 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque. The Senna LM engine's been blueprinted, the heads ported and polished, and four exhaust pipes stand up through the Senna LM's engine cover. The standard Senna shows three pipes.

McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari call for unfreezing F1 engines

Formula One is a hugely expensive sport. Not only do you have enormous salaries and logistical expenses, as you would in any other sport, but each team also spends huge sums developing their own chassis from the ground up – and so too do the participating automakers in developing the engines. One of the ways the series organizers mitigate those costs is by freezing development. So once the new crop of V6 turbo hybrid powertrains were developed, that was it. But now three of the of the sport's leading teams are calling on the FIA to unfreeze engine development. Their reason? Unfair advantage. There's little question that Mercedes did the best job of developing its "power unit" to meet the new regulations that took effect at the beginning of this past season. That's how the Mercedes team won all but three of the grands prix this season and finished with at least one car on the podium at every single race. It's also a big part of how the teams that bought their engines from Mercedes this season managed to consistently outperform the other non-works-supported teams. That clear advantage is why Red Bull, Ferrari and now McLaren are calling for engine development to be unfrozen. Their argument is that, under the current locked-down status quo, their engine suppliers (Renault, Ferrari and Honda, respectively) cannot possibly catch up. So unless the FIA and Formula One Management want the next few seasons to be the kind of absolute blow-outs that this past season was, these leading teams argue, the powers that be are going to have to make some changes. For its part, Mercedes naturally counters that unfreezing engine development would send costs spiraling out of control. But then of course it stands to lose the most by re-opening engine development. If those three teams, however, closely intertwined as they are with the three other engine suppliers participating in next year's championship, manage to solicit enough support from the other customer teams and bring the matter to a vote, Mercedes may very well find itself out-numbered. News Source: ESPNImage Credit: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Motorsports Ferrari McLaren Mercedes-Benz F1 engine