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Fernando Alonso will miss the Australian Grand Prix

McLaren's apparent misdirection about Fernando Alonso's test crash injuries has come to an end.

The team announced Tuesday that the two-time Formula 1 champion would miss the Australian Grand Prix on March 14. He'll be replaced by Kevin Magnussen, who drove for the team in 2014.

From McLaren's statement:

Having performed an exhaustive series of tests and scans – some of them as recently as yesterday evening – McLaren-Honda driver Fernando Alonso’s doctors have informed him that they find him asymptomatic of any medical issue; that they see no evidence whatsoever of any injury; and that they therefore describe him as entirely healthy from neurological and cardiac perspectives alike.

However, Fernando’s doctors have recommended to him that, following the concussion he sustained in a testing accident at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on February 22nd, for the time being he should seek to limit as far as is possible any environmental risk factors that could potentially result in his sustaining another concussion so soon after his previous one, so as to minimise the chances of second impact syndrome, as is normal medical procedure when treating athletes after concussions.

In order to limit those environmental risk factors, specifically, his doctors have advised that he should not compete in the imminent Australian Grand Prix meeting, which will take place on March 13th, 14th and 15th.

Alonso moved to McLaren in advance of the 2015 season from Ferrari. (Sebastian Vettel is now at Ferrari in Alonso's place) He was taken to the hospital after the testing crash, where he was kept overnight after he was being knocked unconscious in the crash.

Just a few days ago, McLaren team principal Ron Dennis said, while acknowledging that Alonso suffered a potential head injury, that the driver was "devoid of injury" when asked if Alonso suffered a neck injury.

He also said the following when asked if Fernando was conscious of the crash.

"I am not protecting McLaren, I am not protecting Fernando, or concealing anything," Dennis said via ESPN F1. "These are the things we know. We can categorically say he has no injury. We can categorically say he did not suffer an electric shock. We can categorically say the car, we believe, did not fail. There are some things we can say, but everything after that becomes subjective and I don't want to be subjective because there's no point at this stage."

He immediately followed those comments up with a simple "He is not even concussed."

While we're not going to rule out the possibility that Alonso was diagnosed with a concussion in the days between Dennis' comments on Feb. 26 and the team's announcement on March 3, it's also not a very large one. Given the driver was knocked out in the impact and immediately taken to the hospital, the odds are great he was immediately diagnosed with one.

And in that case, McLaren's comments about it's new star driver look like either blatant lies or the remarks of people who have no clue about head injuries. Maybe it's even both? Heck, the statements make football teams' previous handling of possible concussions look thorough.

Hopefully this is a lesson for McLaren – and all other racing teams – that concussions are serious business. They are injuries, even if the people who have suffered them are soon "asymptomatic of any medical issue."

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!