This paper presents an analysis of laser–plasma interaction risks of the shock ignition (SI) scheme and experimental results under conditions relevant to the corona of a compressed target. Experiments are performed on the LIL facility at the 10 kJ level, on the LULI 2000 facility with two beams at the kJ level and on the LULI 6-beam facility with 100 J in each beam. Different aspects of the interaction of the SI pulse are studied exploiting either the flexibility of the LULI 6-beam facility to produce a very high intensity pulse or the high energy of the LIL to produce long and hot plasmas. A continuity is found allowing us to draw some conclusions regarding the coupling quality and efficiency of the SI spike pulse. It is shown that the propagation of the SI beams in the underdense plasma present in the corona of inertial confinement fusion targets could strongly modify the initial spot size of the beam through filamentation. Detailed experimental studies of the growth and saturation of backscattering instabilities in these plasmas indicate that significant levels of stimulated scattering reflectivities (larger than 40%) may be reached at least for some time during the SI pulse.