The Sheer Force of Will Power
Page 1
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my parents, brothers, my wife,
family and friends who I’ve met along the way, without whom
it would be impossible for me to be where I am today.
Contents
Dedication
Foreword by Mark Webber
Introduction by Will Power
Introduction by David Malsher
1 Facing the demons
2 Roots
3 Breaking it and making it
4 Holden his own
5 Going international
6 Tomorrow, the World Series
7 Formula 1 – an unfulfilled dream
8 Hello Team Australia
9 Miss American Pie
10 Winning
11 Bittersweet year
12 The big chance
13 Pillar of strength
14 The long audition
15 Agony, morphine and ecstasy
16 Becoming “The Man”
17 Lessons learned too late
18 Don’t dream it’s over
19 One aim
20 Hot summer night
21 Onward and upward
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
Foreword
By Mark Webber
Will Power – could there be a better name for a racing driver?! But, it isn’t just an awesome name, it’s one that describes the nature of the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series champion in two easy words. The first Australian to win America’s premier single-seater category, Will fought his way to the top the hard and bruising way. His career spanned three continents as he tried to keep his dream alive; from his early days plying his trade in Formula Ford, Formula 3 and Formula Holden in Australia to the brave move to Europe in 2003, where I came across him trying to carve out a career for himself in the shark-infested waters of junior racing categories. However, the pivotal point in Will’s journey came when he accepted his career wasn’t gaining the traction it needed in Europe due to a lack of funding. He simply packed his bags again, made a career-defining move to America and never looked back. As they say, the rest is history.
I’m proud to say Will has been a friend of mine for over eleven years now and I’ve watched his roller-coaster ride, delighting in his successes and commiserating with his misfortunes, none more so than when the IndyCar title slipped from his grasp three times. On two of those occasions he was beaten by another good friend of mine, Will’s arch-rival – and some would say nemesis – Dario Franchitti.
Will arrived in England with barely a couple of dollars to rub together and knowing next to nobody. I remember him racing with holes in his gloves and he’d gladly accept any hand-me-downs I could put his way – anything from visors and visor strips to training kit. While he wasn’t the only Australian to knock on our door looking for advice, Will was the first one who my partner Ann and I wanted to help. Although Will and I are from different states in Australia, he from Queensland and me from New South Wales, we are both essentially country-town boys sharing a similar upbringing and outlook on life, and a dream to do what very few Antipodean racing drivers had done before – make it to the very top of our sport. I could see plenty of the Aussie mongrel in Will. He struck me as an extremely intense and competitive individual; in fact, I’d even go so far as saying his intensity, which sometimes borders on paranoia, is precisely what has driven him to succeed at the highest level. He certainly had to use all of those qualities and more in the early days in the UK, when he was under the most pressure to keep his career alive and give it momentum. Although his results weren’t always indicative of his talent, the one constant during that tumultuous period was that each time he got in a racing car, irrespective of its performance and capabilities, he would screw every last tenth of a second out of it. To do that, he had to be versatile and quick to adapt, and this didn’t go unnoticed by those in the game. He won plenty of admirers who knew he didn’t have the best equipment at his disposal, and the small community of Australians in the UK industry rallied around and did the best they could to keep Will’s career on track, including my former team bosses, Alan Docking and Paul Stoddart.
At this time, I was racing for Jaguar in F1 and had seen enough to know Will could, with the right breaks, follow in my footsteps one day. I was happy to contribute to the pot of money he had managed to raise himself and I negotiated a deal for him to race for Trevor Carlin’s team in World Series by Renault (WSR), where he went toe-to-toe with Robert Kubica. However, I always thought that one of the biggest problems for Will throughout his early career was that he was always having to juggle his career around to find the best sponsorship opportunities and free drives. It meant he was regularly jumping in and out of other categories and cars, whether it was a bit of A1GP, V8 Supercars, F3 or WSR commitments. It was his own gutsy decision to forgo the last rounds of WSR in 2005 for a chance to race in the Surfers Paradise round of the Champ Car World Series. It proved an inspired decision as it paved the way for his transition to American racing and a full-time drive for Team Australia in the 2006 Champ Car series.
Inevitably, with both of us pursuing a professional racing career in different parts of the world, our contact became limited to the occasional phone call – generally when the chips were down for one or the other of us – and an all-too-brief catch-up when we visited for the Formula 1 race in Indianapolis, where Will first made his home in the States. Of those phone calls, there’s one that I will never forget: it came hours after Dan Wheldon tragically lost his life at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011. Will had won six races during the year and was 18 points behind Dario going into the year’s finale but his championship campaign ended in that violent high-speed fifteen-car crash and a trip to the hospital with a nasty back injury. Of course, all of that paled into insignificance given what had happened to Dan, someone both of us knew well. I spoke to Will from Singapore where I had raced in the grand prix, and it was obvious he was still in shock. But I could tell by the way he was speaking he was thinking about the bigger picture, perhaps for the first time in his career. Will matured several years during the course of that one phone conversation.
I think that day was a game-changer in Will’s career: it put things into a hugely different perspective for him. He returned for the 2012 season and mounted another strong championship campaign and although his year ended with another crash in the final round, he was now mature and composed enough to put it behind him and start a clean sheet again in 2013. He continued to excel on the street and road course tracks that had also been his bread-and-butter in Australia and Europe, but that season he started to really nail the ovals, too. Finally, in 2014 he put it all together, was strong everywhere, and the result was the Verizon IndyCar Series title.
Will’s dogged determination and perseverance continue to stand him in good stead and have made him at minimum a regular frontrunner, at best the benchmark for premier single-seater racing in America. He is respected, often grudgingly, by rivals who say that on certain days he does things with a car that blows them away; he puts on a masterclass and annihilates the field. There are no frills or fuss about Will: he’s the ultimate rugged racer who just wants to race. I wouldn’t say he couldn’t have been a top-class F1 driver, but on the other hand, I don’t think Will Power hanging out in Monaco was ever going to happen either! He’s fine just as he is – still the country-town boy from Australia who made good in America.
Introduction
By Will Power
No matter how hard a racing driver, engineer, strategist, crew chief and crew prepare for a race, there are always unexpected twists
that they’ve got to react to. They start a race with Plans A, B, and C to cover the alternatives, but in a championship as close as the Verizon IndyCar Series, it’s actually Plan D that you’re forced to use because of circumstances – that’s the plan you come up with while the race is still going on! It might be a blend of those other pre-race plans, or it could be something totally different.
Well, to me, a racer’s career is very like that. You work so hard at it and you come up with aims and ambitions, but there’s no way you’re going to get your best-case scenario each time. So you’ve got to be prepared to make changes on the fly, and go down routes that you maybe didn’t consider before.
Although I didn’t like those career dilemmas at the time, looking back for the sake of this book, I found it interesting to play the chain game – “If this hadn’t happened, that wouldn’t have happened; if I’d done this, maybe it would have led to that,” and so on. I started my career aiming for Formula 1, but not just to be there. I never wanted to be one of those F1 drivers who spend year after year buried midfield because they don’t have a front-running car. I love racing in a series where the cars are basically equal and it comes down to the team and the driver to find the winning edge.
So when the chance came up to switch to US open-wheel racing, I didn’t hesitate. One day during a test session last year, while my Team Penske crew were working on the car, I stood on the pit wall and watched all my rivals head out on track and I was saying in my head, “He could win this weekend . . . so could he . . . so could he . . .” I counted twenty potential race winners, and I don’t think you get that in any other form of motorsport. That’s what I love about IndyCar.
The chance to race for a team as great as Penske has been the biggest bonus of my career, no question. Off the track, the chance to meet, date and eventually marry Elizabeth is the only exception to what I said earlier – a Plan A that I could commit to completely. Liz not only returned the favor but also committed herself to my career, and that’s something I appreciate every single day. The fact that her mom, Kathy, has also looked after me pretty much from the start of my time in the US is amazing.
Putting this book together has been an interesting experience, because it made me realize how many people have played a really significant part in getting me to where I am, and I’m very thankful how many of them have stayed fans and were pleased to contribute (see Acknowledgments, page 327). In particular, I can’t thank Mark Webber enough for not only writing the Foreword to this book but also the faith he and his partner, Ann Neal, showed in me back when I was just another crazy young racer with wild eyes and a wide-open throttle. Down the years, he’s been very good to chat with, but it’s how he handles himself that I admire most. His total determination and self-belief have never made him cocky, and I’ve seen him behave with total dignity when things have gone wrong. That sets an example for us all.
I’ve got to thank David Malsher for somehow coming up with 100,000 words about me. I’ve been reading his stories for ten years now and I like his writing style; he loves Indy car racing and, like Derrick Walker told me back in 2006, “Malsher gets it.” But maybe most importantly, he’s fair. In fact, that’s a big part of why I asked David to write the book – not because he’s a stone-cold disciple of mine, but because he’s not. He’s honest to me and about me, and I’ve always responded to him in the same way.
In fact, as you’ll discover when you read this book, throughout my time in motorsport, I’ve only listened to people who offer “tough love,” because I don’t want to hear anything except the truth. That way, I can improve myself and gauge my progress, and that’s important to me because I always have new goals.
This story is about the goals I’ve achieved so far.
Charlotte, North Carolina
June 2015
Introduction
By David Malsher
In the first two races in which I saw Will Power compete, he finished second each time. They were hugely creditable performances given that he was competing in British Formula 3 and on neither occasion was he with the best team. At that time, this now defunct series contained a deeper talent pool of open-wheel racers than any other junior series on earth.
But would this young Aussie become exceptional? It was too early to say. Nigel Mansell, who went on to become Formula 1 World Champion and Indy car champion, had looked good but nothing special in Formula 3. By way of contrast, Jan Magnussen had finally broken the legendary Ayrton Senna’s victory tally in his season of F3, yet achieved nothing at the top levels of open-wheel racing. In other words, Formula 3 can only tell you so much. If Will was to become as outstanding on the world stage as he had been in the Australian junior categories of the sport, it was down to him. Thankfully, he was more prepared to commit to his career than I was prepared to commit to an opinion about his potential . . .
Eighteen months later, our paths crossed for maybe three minutes of driver–journalist one-on-one time at his second-ever Champ Car World Series race in Mexico City. He’d done a fine job a couple of weeks earlier on his series debut in front of his home crowd in Surfers Paradise, Australia, because, despite being overwhelmed by the attention from the local media and well-wishing compatriots, he looked anything but overawed on track. And here in Mexico, he looked like he’d been driving these 750 hp Champ Car monsters for years. I spent one practice session watching at the fast S-bends at the back of the track and, while Will’s exuberance caused him to make occasional minor errors, his commitment was total. This guy was clearly intimidated by nothing.
His first full season at this level, 2006, convinced me that Will was a driver of real substance. At first he blew hot and cold from race to race as he learned the cars and the tracks. But by the second half of the season, I realized we were watching a driver rapidly evolve into a genuine match for Champ Car’s top dogs of the time. The day Will clinched the Rookie of the Year title was the first time he and I sat down for a proper interview, as opposed to me just grabbing quotes about what went wrong or right for him in practice, qualifying or a race.
I still recall how extraordinary he was. I encountered a young man of brutal honesty. He wasn’t quite ready to be completely open, but what he did say was meaningful and detailed. No bullshit, no bland generalizations. What really distinguished him from most of his colleagues was that he wasn’t on the defensive. Will admitted his errors and didn’t try to blame the team or another driver. In fact, even when discussing incidents in which the other party had already admitted being at fault, Will would qualify his version of the same event with something along the lines of “but maybe I could have done this or that.” In other words, he went out of his way to claim some responsibility.
Almost a decade later, while Mr Power has increased in status – as I write this he’s amassed twenty-five Indy car wins, forty-one pole positions, a hard-earned IndyCar Series title, and he drives for the most prestigious team in US motorsport history – the man himself hasn’t changed. He’s coated his talent in thick layers of experience, but his soul is still laid bare in interviews and he continues to examine his own performances in a harsh and critical manner.
And that is what has served him so well as a racer; the complete absence of arrogance has allowed him to constantly improve himself because he never underestimates the opposition. He once told me: “I’ve never raced against anyone who I felt I couldn’t beat if I worked hard enough. So I go to every race feeling that my close rivals can beat me if they work hard enough. So I have to work harder.” I can’t help but deeply admire anyone, in any walk of life, who is so devoted to their craft. The fact that he’s truly exceptional at it is his just reward.
Will and I had talked for three or four years about writing a book together, so when he got a concrete offer from HarperCollins Australia and called me, I told him it would be an honor. It has been that and more.
Newport Beach, California
June 2015
Chapter 1
Facing the demons
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It’s Will Power’s final pre-race TV interview at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, before embarking on the last stage of his quest for the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series championship. With his facial lines and features accentuated in the shadows cast by a setting SoCal sun, Power looks more weary than tense, but his words and manner betray him. The Australian drawl sounds languid enough to convince the unaware that he’s perhaps about to get in his street car and drive to a store, but his replies start early – unusual for a guy who likes to measure all angles of an interviewer’s questions before opening his mouth – and they’re also very guarded. The TV guy’s smart, realizes he’s not going to get any deep insights at this juncture, detects the “Enough already” vibe from the title favorite, and closes out.
A vague flicker of a smile for the cameras from the driver as the interview ends – actually, it’s more a “thanks for taking the hint, pal” – then visible relief in Will’s body language as he turns to the people assembled around the back of his racecar. Right now, just a few moments before he pulls on his balaclava and crash helmet, they’re the only people he wants to speak to and listen to, the only ones who matter. There’s his wife, Liz; his race engineer, Dave Faustino; his strategist, overseer and Team Penske president, Tim Cindric; and his crew, headed by chief mechanic Matt Jonsson. They’ve shared his quest for the IndyCar title, this year and seasons past, and so have thrilled at his highs and suffered through his lows. If there are any people with as much riding on this result as Power, they’re within this tight-knit group. All seem in good spirits, projecting confidence, trying to keep their driver loose and relaxed.
Actually, there are a few others with just as much vested in the quest: both sides of the family, naturally, countless folk from principal sponsor Verizon, and several people within the Penske organization – not least Roger Penske, The Captain, himself. However, there’s an odd twist here. While Roger Penske’s in the happy position of knowing he’s pretty much guaranteed one of his drivers will win the championship tonight, he’s calling for the other one, Helio Castroneves. Not cheering, note, but calling, as in “calling race strategy”. Now, RP’s squad is a famed and consummate example of the “no-‘I’-in-‘team’” cliché, but from Power’s perspective that other cliché – if one wins, we all win – can’t even be contemplated. For one thing, it goes against instinct for a racecar driver to think that way; your teammate is one of your principal rivals. Secondly, Will’s witnessed the good-natured competition between his own man, Cindric, and Penske when they’re battling strategically from the pit wall. Will knows what a buzz his legendary boss will get if Castroneves, in his fifteenth season at the team, finally wins his first IndyCar championship. Not surprisingly, Castroneves’ three Indianapolis 500 wins for Team Penske have earned him a special place in Roger’s heart.