The clever people in the McLaren marketing department have produced a poster for this weekend with the slogan “Race of Two Worlds”. It couldn’t be more true. Monte Carlo is where the sunlight glints on the Mediterranean and the yachts bob in the harbour. It’s high fashion, suede loafers, linen shirts, ageing supermodels and Gerard Butler. Indianapolis Motor Speedway is none of those things.

The Monaco Grand Prix is Formula One’s flagship race. The streets of the Principality don’t make for a great race track for contemporary F1 cars, but they have history and are paved with bling, and the sponsors and high-rollers love them. After the race the beautiful people will party into the warm night, some of them might even know who won. Others, those who actually care about motor racing, will turn their attention to Indianapolis.

Sorry Monaco, Prince Albert, Naomi Campbell and Gucci, the big race on Sunday is the Indy 500. The four-cornered course known as the Brickyard can hold 450,000 spectators and they will be as ordinary as people in the Mid-West get. Baseball caps and khaki shorts are the dress code, whooping and hollering are they way to make your presence felt, Budweiser, not Bollinger, will wash down the hot dogs. But their eyes will be drawn to a slice of European racing royalty. Of the 33 drivers on the grid – and given the nature of the race, just about any one of them could win – Fernando Alonso will be the focus of attention.

A two-time world champion in a retro-liveried, papaya orange car that has been entered by McLaren is the marketing move of the motorsport century. When Zak Brown became the Executive Director of the McLaren Technology Group he inherited a mess of an F1 operation, but he was aware of a world beyond the gated community of grand-prix racing.

McLaren and Alonso’s F1 efforts have been hobbled by a hopeless Honda engine, but the Japanese giant also power Indycars and Brown could see the bigger picture. A good run at Indianapolis could make McLaren shine again in a season that offered only despair. Alonso is up for the challenge and has quickly learnt to drive the 2.5-mile lap of Indianapolis Motor Speedway in excess of 230mph. The Spaniard will line up fifth for Sunday’s race and victory is a real possibility.

There will always be those who belittle US-style oval racing, who think even a well-trained chipmunk could turn left for 500 miles, but Indianapolis is motor racing in its rawest form, a high-speed, high-wire act without a net. Get it wrong and there are no second chances.

If Alonso pulls it off, like Jim Clark and Graham Hill did before him – and many others, Jackie Stewart included, have tried – it will be the biggest win of his career. Brown has already pulled it off, he has scripted the best story motor racing has had in years. Maybe even the Monaco glitterati will want to see how it ends.