The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  The faith shown in them by these successful veterans of racing’s hand-to-mouth junior categories bolstered the confidence of Kerry and Will, who soon moved house to be nearer their unofficial foster parents. Kerry began working for them three days a week, in between traveling with Will to the races. And almost simultaneously, a new dawn arose from Down Under: the Australian Motor Sport Foundation made a commitment to fund Will racing the remainder of the season at the well-respected Formula 3 team Fortec Motorsport. Just a year earlier, Fortec had finished third in the championship with then future F1 race winner, Heikki Kovalainen.

  Observes Simmons: “Unfortunately, 2003 was a lean year for [team owner] Richard Dutton, and Fortec certainly wasn’t yet the powerhouse in junior single-seaters that it is these days. In 2002, Dutton had entrusted a guy called David Hayle with running the team on a day-to-day basis, but then David went it alone, set up Hitech Racing and took with him the Renault Driver Development scheme funding. Fortec carried on using Renault engines in 2003 but money was tight.

  “It was a tough F3 field, deep in talent, and coming into it [properly] so late with a team that wasn’t flush with resources, it was always going to be hard for Power to run at the front, at least, on a consistent basis. There were flashes of form, but it was pretty erratic.”

  Richard Dutton himself adds: “The Renaults weren’t the best. They had good top-end power, but at most tracks they weren’t the equal of a Mugen-Honda or an Opel-Spiess, which we switched to the following year.”

  At that point, Will Power didn’t care; he had a drive, it was reasonably competitive, and that was enough for now. “First race with a Dallara-Renault, we qualified fifth and finished fifth. Man, that was such a big weight off my mind. I hadn’t forgotten how to drive!”

  “Will was brave, spectacular and had great car control,” recalls Dutton, “but in Formula 3 where the cars have more grip than power, throwing the car around isn’t the quickest way. However, as the year went on, you could see this overdriving reduce and he just got better and better. In fact, I’m surprised to realize he scored only one podium for us because I recall him running top five at some point virtually every race.”

  “After that fifth at Castle Combe, I got another fifth at Rockingham,” says Power, “but I damaged my back going over those stupid curbs there. Then I got second at Thruxton – Renault’s top-end power was perfect for a fast track like that – then fourth at Spa [Belgium]. That one was a pity because I’d just passed Nelson Piquet Jr for third when they threw the red flag because of a crash and the positions were reversed to how they’d been the lap before.”

  Despite a massive shunt in practice for the finale at Brands Hatch – an event Will feels would have seen him produce his best-ever Formula 3 performance – he recalls that half-season with pleasure. It was, he says, hugely educational, largely because of race engineer Phil Di Fazio.

  Says Power: “You know how you have points in your life where someone or something hits you between the eyes with knowledge or an experience that stays with you forever? Well, Phil was one of those people in my career. He wasn’t just analytical about engineering; he was analytical about driving and so, as a young driver, you got more and more to think about from him. Like he’d say, ‘When you’re on new tires, don’t brake later. Just bleed off the brake pressure sooner to use the extra grip.’ He asked me, ‘What happens when you do that?’ and I said, ‘It understeers.’ ‘Exactly!’ he said, ‘and there’s your balance that you need to work on.’”

  “I suppose I’m a bit different from a lot of engineers,” says Di Fazio, “in that I appreciate the interaction with drivers and recognize that they’re humans who need coaching to get the best from the car. They shouldn’t be expected to just jump in and get everything right the first time. And Will was just a great student, really interested in this stuff, never behaved like he already knew it all. But what he really had going for him was that he was very competitive, very determined and a real perfectionist, and that’s very like me! At first he’d be a little bit shy at coming forward and saying, ‘Hmmm, I think we need to adjust the front anti-roll bar by two mill,’ because he was worried we’d think he was crazy wanting such a small adjustment, but I was that way as well. So I’d say to him, ‘If that’s what you want, we can give you that; don’t be afraid to ask.’

  “Anyway, I’d explain what the car needed to be fast and the way it should feel in terms of setup. Then in terms of his driving, it was his corner entry that needed focus. He was still right-foot braking at the time, so I got him to change that, to maximize the potential of the car particularly into slower corners. He needed to work on the braking–bleeding off brake pressure–corner-entry sequence. So I told him what he needed to feel from the car as he turned in and what he needed the car to feel like as he applied the power coming out of the corner. And he worked on that and learned easily.

  “Now, making the front end of a car so positive is the fastest way, but it naturally makes the car more nervous at the rear, and there are some drivers who can’t handle that, or they’re not precise enough to take advantage of the wheels going exactly where they should go. They end up slower than if we’d left it with the easier, slower setup. But Will had this great car control so he didn’t mind that at all: whatever was the fastest setup, he’d deal with it.”

  It seemed like a match made in heaven, and with Fortec about to switch to Opel engines for 2004, prospects looked bright for Power if he remained where he was. Bearing in mind that Fortec took James Rossiter to third in the championship the following year, what might Will have done with half a season’s experience under his belt?

  “Will would have won races with us and been competing with Nelson Piquet Jr and Adam Carroll for the championship in 2004,” says Dutton. “I’ve no doubts about that. We were sad when he switched to Alan Docking Racing, because we liked the way Will worked. He wouldn’t let anything distract him, and if your driver is 100 per cent committed, that brings out the best in everyone around him. Another thing I liked about him is that if he’d damaged the car on a curb or whatever, he was always willing to get stuck in to help the team fix it, and that was unusual for a kid of his age. So a real team player and a real pleasure to work with.”

  Given the Australian Motor Sport Foundation’s strong links with Docking, the fact that Power’s semi-mentor Webber had raced successfully at ADR, and that Alan had also taken Britain’s Robbie Kerr to the Formula 3 title as recently as 2002, it was perhaps inevitable and also logical that Power would end up there in 2004. That seat didn’t come cheap, though, and Power rolls his eyes at the memory of how many people were keeping his dream alive.

  “Contributing at that point were Dad, Maher Algadri, the AMSF [Australian Motor Sport Foundation] and also its chairman, Tom Warwick, put some of his own personal money in. And then Mark introduced us to Danny Wallis, a successful businessman from Melbourne, who turned out to be a star for us. When money got tight, he did things like starting a campaign where he’d match dollar for dollar anything that other businessmen put up to keep my career going. And it worked. We eventually got the funding for the full season.”

  And how far it could stretch was aided just a little by a deal Bob Power had negotiated for 2004 after watching his wallet grow thinner throughout 2003.

  “The insurance excess with Fortec was £2500, which was about A$4500,” Bob recalls, “and so every time Will knocked a wing off or needed a new underbody or whatever, I’d get a bill through . . . So I told him, ‘For God’s sake stop hitting things, stop breaking stuff!’ He didn’t used to crash, but he drove with a lot of vigor, let’s say, so there was a steady stream of invoices each month. Well, the following year, Docking gave me a reasonable price for my contribution to Will’s season, but I insisted, ‘Damages are on you. I’m not paying insurance excess for broken parts,’ and he agreed to that. When I told Will, all his inhibitions disappeared; I think it was a bit like letting your dog off the leash . . .”

  However ra
bid he was in a Formula 3 car, outside the cockpit, Power was shy and a quiet interviewee . . . unless the adrenaline was still pumping.

  “Will had done some media training with the Australian Institute of Sport,” Kerry recalls, “but it was awkward just after a race when he’d just be blunt, say the truth and be passionate about it. Sit-down interviews . . . they were tough at that stage, too, but by then he’d at least come to recognize that dealing with the media was part of the deal as his status grew within the paddock. It certainly never came naturally to him, though.”

  Nonetheless, Autosport’s Simmons warmed to this kid with the wild stare but relaxed drawl. “Will was obviously a bit different from the normal drivers, different even from the normal Australians you get over in England,” he says. “The things he said were simultaneously intelligent and funny and they were delivered in a very, very dry way. And those eyes, as well – you never knew if he was being intense or vacant. But there seemed to be a kind of twinkle there as if he was having a laugh, and from what I see and read about him now, he hasn’t changed.

  “If you caught him in the paddock, he was normally with Will Davison, and there was always a bit of banter going on between the sharp guy from down south in Victoria, and the guy from Toowoomba, a thousand miles north.”

  If the banter was pleasant, the rivalry between the two Wills still existed. As Kerry puts it. “Will was paranoid. Well, not exactly paranoid . . . Yeah, paranoid.

  “When we first came over to England, Will Davison used to invite us over to where he and his girlfriend were living, and the conversation was always general, no specifics. Afterwards, we’d get in the car to go home and Will would be cursing about all the little extras Davison had! That really grated with him because a lot of the time we were having to just make do, trying to stretch A$1000 for up to five or six weeks at a time. Will was never envious of other people, so I think this was an Aussie rivalry thing: they were chasing the same sponsorship, and Will thought he needed it more than Davison. So I understood and I did sympathize.”

  Says Davison: “Will and I were still getting along okay in Britain, but we were definitely clashing heads because we were fighting for the same money from back home and the same media attention. But once I quit F3 midway through 2004 and headed home to Australia and Will headed off to America in 2005, we’ve been fine ever since. I’m genuinely pleased by his success in IndyCar and I hope he’s pleased for me to be making a career in V8 Supercars.”

  A move to the US – or anywhere else, for that matter – on the strength of his European showings didn’t look likely for Power in 2004, however. The Docking seat was no automatic passport to success.

  “Alex Lloyd [British rising star] was going to be my teammate, but he bailed even before the season started,” Will recalls, “so ADR was down to just being a one-car operation and that put us on the back foot right away.”

  Docking concurs, and observes: “Will was bobbing around like a cork in the ocean, and I think having a teammate would have made a lot of difference. It would have calmed him down but also given him someone to bounce ideas off, share data with. If we could slow him down, Will was definitely capable of being our next Robbie Kerr. But it was such a strong field that drivers who lived on the ragged edge like him didn’t have the consistency to put a championship campaign together. He was almost too fast for his own good – his aggression was too much, so he didn’t get a truly representative place in the championship standings.”

  Mark Webber did his best to help the new kid in his old team. “When Will was in F3, that was probably when I was most able to transfer some of my experience to him about the cars and circuits, and also help him learn how to put a whole race weekend together. Also, Will was more insecure back then and he’d be really, really hard on himself about not having the right equipment, whereas I’d tell him to use that opportunity to show people what he could do with the tools he had.”

  And that he did. “Thank God I had that half season with Fortec under my belt,” says Power, “because at least that gave me a reference point – I knew how a good car should feel. ADR were still using setups that had helped Kerr win the title a couple of years earlier, and stuff like that evolves all the time so it was a struggle. I remember in testing, our fastest lap was set on twenty-lap-old tires, which is just insane! So I went and got hold of the standard Dallara F304 manual, and read it cover to cover, and I started to really have an influence on the way we went about things. I got it back to basics with the damper settings, the differential, and suddenly we were at the front. I think maybe I went too much the other way – I think I used up tires too quickly, so there’d be times when I was chasing the leader in the first half of the race, but by the end, I’d be having to focus on defending from the guy behind, instead.”

  The fact that ADR was running just one car in the Championship class and one in the Scholarship class (for older cars), is a clear indication that Docking didn’t have the money to go testing, nor use up tires experimenting with setups that might have helped its driver retain grip for the entire duration of a race. Instead, there were races where Power and Docking’s engineers had to take some educated guesses in terms of car setup, and that’s when the team boss came to appreciate his driver’s technical savvy, and also his brutal honesty.

  “You could see his roots in building and rebuilding racecars,” says Docking. “He didn’t ask many questions, not because he didn’t want to know about the technical side but because he already knew it. The other thing was that he was just so honest, never tried to hide his mistakes, never blamed the car when he felt he could have done a better job. In that way, he was very different from some of the other drivers we’ve worked with of a similar age.”

  However much Docking liked his driver’s smarts and determination – “Will’s got the competitiveness of ten men!” – it wasn’t enough to earn Power a win that year. Instead he got three runner-up finishes and a pair of thirds.

  “Yeah, and all in the first half of the season,” Will points out. “After that, all the multi-car teams just started pulling away from us.”

  If the results sheets were a little disappointing then, Docking was still left in no doubt about the strengths of the guy in the cockpit.

  “Balancing talent with aggression didn’t come easy to him – there was a mad battle going on in his head! – but I knew one day he’d be a star. He was just too much of a fighter to ever quit before he made it, so combine that with his total honesty and determination to improve himself, and he was obviously going to rise to the top. When we ran him again in the Team Australia A1GP car the following season, his progress in just a year was remarkable. I mean, as soon as he got in the car, he was on it. And I have no doubts that if we had succeeded in getting him back for that series in 2008, he’d have won the championship. He just wasn’t going to throw in the towel.”

  Yet it was at the end of 2004 when Will Power came closest to doing exactly that.

  Chapter 6

  Tomorrow, the World Series

  “End of 2004 I had nothing again, and going back to F3 for a third year just didn’t make sense,” says Will Power. “When you think about how hard it had been to gather all that money together, doing all that again to just stand still with your career? Nah. No point.

  “The one thing I had was a Minardi Formula 1 test that [fellow-Australian team owner] Paul Stoddart had put together at Misano [see Chapter 7]. There were about six weeks between the end of the F3 season and that test, so I tried to find a Formula 3000 team who’d let me run at Misano, just so I’d have a heads-up about the track before getting in the F1 car. I got a couple of numbers and this really good-quality Italian team called Draco got back to me and said, ‘Yeah, we’re doing a test at Misano. Come down.’ So I went there early to make a seat.”

  Professional teams use seats with a thin carbon fiber shell for protection and with foam on top, custom-formed for each driver’s unique physique. Letting that foam set adequately can take hours, hence
Power’s early departure for Italy. Besides which, he’d never driven a genuine current-era Formula 3000 car before, as opposed to the ageing F3000-based Formula Holdens, so it seemed smart to get acquainted with the machinery he’d be driving, too.

  “The trip didn’t start too well,” chuckles Power. “I got to Bologna airport and picked up a rental car, and I’m looking at this map they give you – no sat nav – and I can’t see the location of this town Pontremoli where Draco is based. So I call up Dr Manfredi Ravetto, one of the team principals, and he starts explaining how to get to the race shop. As he’s talking, I still can’t see Pontremoli on the map, and when he’s telling me all the names of the places I should see on my drive down, I can’t see any of those, either.

  “Anyway, he hangs up and I’m pretty much lost before I’ve even left the airport. And I guess Ravetto must already think I’m a disaster and unlikely to show up at all. Then I realize that I’ve been looking at a map of just downtown Bologna. I turn it over and there’s a map of the west coast of Italy and there’s Pontremoli. I think, ‘You wanker.’

  “So I get to the factory, and I’m stupid enough to explain why I was even more stupid a couple of hours ago, so that must just confirm what they already think of me. But, as I’m there, they decide to make a seat for me anyway . . .”

  To make these test days worthwhile, a race team generally likes to run as many drivers as possible (for a price, of course). Two of those Power found himself testing alongside were Timo Lienemann who had just finished second in the German Formula 3 series, and Olivier Tielemans, who already had six Formula 3000 starts. Power finished the day a full second quicker than both of them.