The racing world was watching yesterday as Fernando Alonso made his qualifying runs at Indianapolis Motor Speedway – his performance did not disappoint!

The headlines today though, quite correctly, are of the man that looked more than capable of topping the times, and by a distance, until, on his third flying lap, at well over 220 mph, it all went wrong for Sebastien Bourdais coming out of Turn One.

The impact was horrifying, and, as reported yesterday evening by our friends at racer.com, after being taken straight to hospital, the diagnosis was that he had suffered multiple fractures to his pelvis and a fracture to his right hip.

We’ll leave it to Marshall Pruett to decode the incident, and more to the point the reasoning as to why the outcome wasn’t much worse. Bourdais though looks to be out of action for the remainder of 2017.

That means not only will he miss the Indianapolis 500, but the Le Mans 24 Hour too where he was due to join Joey Hand and Dirk Müller in their defence of the GTE Pro title in the #68 Ford Chip Ganassi USA Ford GT (Sebastien is seen above in the run-up to the team’s victory at Le Sarthe last year).

We’ll send our best wishes to Sebastien for a rapid recovery, and await news of who Ford will nominate as a replacement.