The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  That regular year-end battle for sponsors and continual leaning on those who’d already donated or underwritten so much had filled Will with dread. Thus a fully funded move to the US open-wheel scene was smart – and his arriving, surviving and eventually thriving as part of Team Penske will always endorse his decision.

  Nonetheless, as a kid who grew up addicted to F1, there will always be a small part of him that wonders how things might have transpired were he “Will Power, Grand Prix driver.” Back in November 2004, just a couple of days after he and Aussie rival Will Davison tested a Minardi Formula 1 car at Misano, Power spoke to writer Mark Glendenning for Australia’s Motorsport News, and there was no hiding the sheer wonder in his voice.

  “The first couple of laps absolutely blow you away,” he told Glendenning. “You can’t believe the horsepower – at first, when you’re accelerating, you can’t even hold your head off the bloody headrest! If you’d spoken to me the instant I jumped out of the car, you’d have gotten some pretty funny responses: I was absolutely on a high. I just could not believe it . . . and once you’ve had a taste of it, you can’t get it out of your system.”

  Perhaps bearing in mind he’d spent the previous two seasons racing 250 horsepower F3 cars, and had tested Draco’s 420 horsepower F3000 car for just a test session, the leap to an 850 horsepower F1 car was always destined to shock. Yet like most F1 virgins, it was the car’s braking abilities that most impressed Power at the time.

  “The thing just stops!” he commented. “It was something that nothing could prepare you for. You’re braking at the 60-meter [200-feet] mark from 315 kph [195 mph] into a corner with a minimum speed of 90 kph [55 mph], or even lower. And that’s the most impressive thing. It gives you a lot of confidence under braking.

  “It was good. I went quicker every time. I figured the best way to do it was not to go straight out and attack the track on every lap, but to ease into it and better my time on every lap. And that’s what I did. I thought that my last new-tire run was going to be my quickest lap, and it was.”

  It takes a lot to impress Power in the motorsport world and, inevitably, as his career has progressed and his experience has grown, there have been fewer and fewer times when he’s been genuinely left in wonder – positively or negatively – about what he’s just been through. This interview, then, was a rare glimpse at the bubbling, enthusiastic Will who these days is cloaked in composure. Soon enough though he slipped into a more analytical mode, and admitted his bright idea to get some experience of the Misano track in an F3000 car the week before hadn’t really made much difference.

  “I have to say, the closest thing to a Formula 1 car is a Formula 3 car, whereas I think a Formula 3000 car is a bit . . . primitive. Doing the F3000 test the week before didn’t help me at all, actually, and probably hindered me. I had to get back into the rhythm of driving a Formula 3 – getting off the brakes earlier and carrying a bit more mid-corner speed.”

  Given the promise shown that day by Power (and Davison, who was only one-tenth of a second slower), it seems a pity to reflect on the fact that it was the first and last time they had a chance to try out a contemporary Formula 1 car. Interestingly, one who shares that wistful sentiment is Daniele Rossi, Will’s engineer from World Series by Renault.

  “Although we got unlucky in 2005, and our results were not as good as our speed,” Rossi says, “if Will had not got that offer to go to America, I don’t think it would have helped him to stay another year in World Series to try and win the championship. He was fast enough already to move to GP2 and then Formula 1. Will’s big strength was his natural speed, being able to find the limit of a car straight away, and already these series were starting to really restrict their testing, so being able to adapt quickly and find that special lap was very, very important. This would have worked well for Will.

  “Like I said earlier, I’m sure if you put Will and Sebastian Vettel in the same car, Will would be ahead. But if you also look at how Robert Kubica went in F1, and how he and Will had compared in World Series, I think it’s obvious that Will had the talent to succeed in Formula 1. I always felt that Will and Robert were very mature for their age – their attitudes, their understanding of racing, their hard work. These days, you see kids in Formula 3 or whatever drive like they are on PlayStation! They just drive flat-out and they don’t spend enough time looking at data with their engineers and trying to develop the car.”

  Interestingly, Rossi is less certain that Power would have fitted into the environment of F1, particularly in terms of political adeptness and assertiveness within a team.

  “I wonder, yes,” he says. “If you look at drivers like Vettel, and the other drivers at the very top, you see they always put themselves – or try to put themselves – in a position where everyone on the team is on their side. They make sure that it is all about them. I don’t know if Will could be like that.”

  Will himself isn’t sure, either. But more than a decade after he felt compelled to turn his back on Europe, he remains certain that the Formula 1 cars themselves would have suited him.

  “I remember wishing I had the chance that [four-time Champ Car champion] Sébastien Bourdais had to join Toro Rosso at the end of 2007, but obviously I didn’t have enough runs on the board at that point. Then, by the time I did start winning regularly for Penske, I was thirty and I felt, ‘Forget it, no way they’re going to look at a guy like me now.’ Maybe I should have pursued it, but . . . I was with Penske – one of the top teams in any category of racing anywhere in the world. That’s not something you should ever give up for a half-chance with a half-ass team. I’d rather be fighting for the championship in IndyCar than wanking around in the middle of the grid in F1, when there’s no hope of graduating.

  “You look at some of these guys who have had a golden record in junior formulas, proven themselves in every midfield F1 team, beaten all their teammates, and were absolute stars. And they’re still not at the top of the list for the big F1 teams. That’s exactly the kind of situation I’d never want to be in. To have all those races under your belt and never even have a podium? Terrible. There’s not a driver in the world who’d say no to trying out a current F1 car – a Mercedes or Ferrari. But as far as the racing goes, I’d really miss the close competition we have in IndyCar.”

  When 2007 World Champion Kimi Räikkönen left the Lotus F1 team two races before the end of the 2013 season, there were some who dared to dream that an IndyCar driver might be given the chance to sub for him at the US Grand Prix held at Circuit of The Americas, in Austin, Texas. And then, when Fernando Alonso had to miss the first GP of 2015, at Melbourne Park in Australia, it was nice to imagine the McLaren team contacting Roger Penske to ask permission to borrow its resident Aussie, the new IndyCar champ.

  Power likes the idea but accepts it’s unrealistic. “I don’t think Formula 1 teams rate IndyCar, which seems funny because when you look at the ex-F1 drivers who’ve underperformed in IndyCar, you see it’s just as tricky to convert the other way. The problem is that drivers have become very specialized in what they do, mainly because of data. IndyCar, Formula 1, NASCAR, V8 Supercar, World Endurance Championship prototypes – how to drive any of those cars fast and get the most out of them in terms of setup takes too long to learn in just a one-off race weekend. I know people like to look back at the days when Mario [Andretti], [Jim] Clark or [Dan] Gurney could just jump into another series and be competitive straight away, but even without all the contract stuff that ties you up now, those days are gone. You need at least a season of experience – testing or racing – to really give your best.”

  Formula 1, in particular, has gone in a unique direction. There are drivers (even current F1 drivers) who lament the category’s switch to hybrid power-units and the demands, beyond driving talent, that they put on the guys in the cockpit. A driver’s résumé does not yet need to include a degree in mathematics and physics, but certainly it’s become more complicated than ever to extract the best from a Formula 1 c
ar.

  “A racer does whatever it takes, though,” shrugs Power. “Look at all the F1 drivers going from 2013 to 2014 who coped when the new regulations came in. If I went there now, so I was completely new to everything, not just the hybrid systems, obviously I’d be at a disadvantage to those with experience. I’d want to learn about the tires and the general feel of the car and the tracks. But I’d work very hard to lessen the learning curve.”

  Ironically, given his view now, when he first became interested in racing, the young Will’s hero was Nelson Piquet. The Brazilian three-time F1 World Champion was infamous for his laid-back attitude and deliberate laziness between races.

  “Piquet won his third World Championship [in 1987] just as I really started taking an interest,” explains Power, “and so that’s why he was the driver I ‘supported’, whatever that means at that age! But since I started racing, the guy I admired was Michael Schumacher. He was relentless, took full advantage of the cars he was given and pretty much had everything covered. From everything I’ve read and heard, he never stopped thinking about racing. I remember reading that even if Michael wasn’t testing at the Ferrari test track in Fiorano and his teammate was, Michael would get all his teammate’s data sent to him that evening and he’d study it.

  “If you want to be successful in any category of racing, it all comes down to hard work, each day of your life.”

  Chapter 8

  Hello Team Australia

  By the spring of 2005, Champ Car team owner Derrick Walker knew he had a problem – several worries, but one overriding problem. His two-car lineup was running a fast racecar driver and an Australian racecar driver, but they weren’t the same person, and for the sake of his team’s new identity – Team Australia – they needed to be.

  You can see where this is going but, first, two short history lessons.

  Walker, who’d been chief mechanic at the Brabham Formula 1 squad in the early 1970s before switching to Penske Racing in 1976, had learned well under Roger Penske. It had opened his eyes to the gold standard of US open-wheel racing and developed in him a strong sense of how a team should run, from top to bottom, left to right and all points in between. When Derrick left Penske, he took a rare opportunity that had tragically arisen at the relatively new Porsche IndyCar team; the marque’s American icon and the team’s talisman, Al Holbert, was killed in a plane crash in 1988. With Walker as team manager, Porsche scored a win in 1989, but at the end of 1990 the German marque withdrew after just four seasons in US open-wheel racing.

  Still, the experience had left Derrick with a taste for running an IndyCar team, and so he purchased Porsche’s assets to form Walker Racing for the 1991 season. It very rapidly became a respectable operation. Scott Goodyear almost won in the team’s second attempt at the Indy 500 in 1992, the mercurial Robby Gordon twice finished fifth in the points standings in the mid-1990s, and then in 1997 only the team’s Goodyear tire contract prevented Gordon’s replacement, Gil de Ferran, from giving Ganassi’s Firestone-shod Alex Zanardi a true battle for the IndyCar championship. However since de Ferran’s departure to join Penske at the end of 1999, Walker had become largely dependent on mediocre drivers who paid – either personally or through sponsors – to race his cars. Darren Manning was a notable exception, and provided glimmers of hope in 2003.

  So that was Walker.

  The other crucial bit of history to note here is that Indy car racing had split in 1996, when president and CEO of Indianapolis Motor Speedway Tony George broke away from Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), the governing body of Indy car racing. He formed a splinter group, the Indy Racing League (IRL), which worked with a small schedule consisting entirely of ovals, mostly unknown drivers and hardly any big teams. Initially, then, it was seen as no big threat to its forebear.

  One of the IRL’s events, however, was the Indianapolis 500, a race that dates back to 1911 and thus possesses a prestige that allows it to transcend any political wars within auto racing. Understandably then, the CART teams looked enviously at what had been their crown jewel up until 1996, and so Ganassi in 2000 and then Penske in 2001 made winning “raids” on Indy, both while racing the full CART calendar. At the end of 2001, Penske switched full-time to the IRL; at the end of 2002, Ganassi, Team Green, Honda and Toyota followed suit. And in the hard winter of 2003, CART froze, and its assets were bought by Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerry Forsythe to form Champ Car.

  US auto racing was thus divided, in broad terms, into IRL – predominantly ovals with a few road/street courses thrown in – and Champ Car, with a schedule comprising road and street courses and just a couple of ovals. Derrick Walker had a foot in each camp back in 2000 and 2001, as he ran top woman racer Sarah Fisher in the IRL, but by the middle of the decade he’d become regarded as a Champ Car loyalist, albeit one who was struggling to get decent results from his less-than-ace drivers.

  NASCAR took full advantage of the dysfunction in single-seater racing, capturing the hearts and minds of America’s auto racing fans. It was a process that had actually started back in the early 1990s with the arrival of California’s Jeff Gordon to threaten the series’ old guard in much the same way as Craig Lowndes would shake up the Australian touring car scene when he switched from open-wheel racing. Understandably, the best TV deals, sponsorship packages and American drivers gravitated toward the most successful form of the sport. Not long after the turn of the millennium, both sides of the open-wheel war were hurting badly, each series surviving on subsidies from the rich men at their head and in the case of IRL, engine supplies from Honda, Toyota and GM. Aside from Long Beach (CART/Champ Car) and the Indy 500 (IRL), US open-wheel racing had faded into anonymity on its home turf. Consequently, it became increasingly hard to find substantial sponsorship money from American companies.

  And then Walker had a brainwave toward the end of 2004. Champ Car’s most successful event in terms of sheer crowd numbers was 9000 miles away from Indianapolis, in Surfers Paradise, Australia – a race that had been established in 1991 and was supported by the wildly popular V8 Supercars series. Over the course of the three-day/four-night beer-, boob-, beach- and barbecue-fest on Queensland’s Gold Coast, some 300,000 people were reported to pass through the gates. Eager to grab a slice of that publicity and therefore funding, Walker approached Aussie entrepreneur Craig Gore, whose Wright Patton Shakespeare company backed a V8 Supercar team, and suggested that he, Walker, run an extra Champ Car at Surfers Paradise with WPS backing. Gore liked the idea and offered the services of one of his drivers, David Besnard, who’d won the 1998 USF2000 championship, and raced in the Atlantic Championship in 1999, both feeder series for CART.

  Besnard’s experience of open-wheel racing before switching to tin-tops hardly prepared him for conducting a 750 horsepower open-wheeler around one of the most fiendishly tricky street circuits in the world, so the fact that he qualified only 1.5 seconds slower than Walker’s solid full-timer, Mario Haberfeld, was deeply impressive. That the Aussie kept his nose clean on race day and survived to finish seventh was also commendable.

  The enthusiasm and publicity generated gave everyone involved a warm glow and so Walker approached Gore with another proposal – to do the same thing full-time. Walker Racing would be rebranded as Team Australia, and would offer a platform for Aussie companies that wanted to increase their market presence in America, while also bringing on young Australian driving talent. Gore went for it, as did his business partner John Fish, and together they bought into Derrick’s team. Their Aussie Vineyards brand would be splashed across the newly green-and-yellow cars and Derrick could now focus on running and improving the team rather than hunting for dollars.

  Issue resolved, Derrick set to work. Out went the old Reynard chassis – which most other teams had given up on long ago – and in came “new” Lolas. The team expanded to two full-time entries, and when Canada’s Alex Tagliani became available just a month before the season started, he was the obvious candidate for a Team Australia seat; his experience and tech
nical acumen would help the team up the Lola learning curve, and he was very fast, if not quite an ace.

  The second seat was to be filled by an Australian and, to Walker’s surprise, Gore already had their man: Marcus Marshall. Perhaps fooled by Besnard’s one-off performance, Gore had overlooked the fact that Marshall was simply not ready for this and his one race win in British Formula 3 had been the result of being smart rather than fast. However, not wishing to upset his new team partner and also lacking an obvious and available alternative, Walker didn’t fight, but instead resolved to get Marshall up to speed.

  But Marshall, one of life’s good guys, was not only in at the deep end, he was in a shark tank with a bloody carcass strapped to his legs. He knew it, too, which further sapped his confidence and therefore pace. Given that so many of Champ Car’s circuits by this time were temporary courses laid out on city streets, he was rarely able to test at a venue on which he’d later race. In a machine blessed with 500 more horsepower than an F3 car, Marshall was understandably tentative, and would qualify anywhere between one and four seconds per lap slower than Tagliani. By mid-season, it became clear that car No. 5’s form wasn’t improving: Walker was concerned, Gore was beyond that point and the Surfers Paradise race was approaching. A new driver was needed.

  “I’d heard about this guy Power in World Series by Renault,” recalls Walker, “and so I spoke to Trevor Carlin about him and he said Will had real potential. One call led to another and so we decided to test him at Portland Raceway in our spare car, which at that point was still a Reynard. Time was getting a bit tight so we really needed Will to be our guy. He hadn’t seen the car or the track before and he turned up alone, looking like a lost child. He was very quiet, hard to get a word out of him.”