The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “That’s because Will was a very good student whose outlook was always, ‘What can I do better?’” says Fry. “For example, after a race, he’d be with the whole team, studying pit stops, asking what he could do to be faster in and out of the pit box, that kind of thing. And I think that’s still part of what makes him great – looking at all the details. You know, there are some drivers who don’t worry about the details, some who don’t recognize the importance of them, and some who don’t realize those details even exist! But Will was very proactive in trying to improve himself.

  “In the second half of the year, when he and Alex were comparing data after a practice session, there’d be corners where Will was quicker, but as the veteran in the team, sometimes there’d be sections where Alex was quicker. Well, when Will saw where he was losing time, he was very good at going out and either matching Tag through those sections or doing even better. So add that to the parts of the track where he was already faster, and he’d produce a really strong lap. I think Will’s possibly the best driver I ever worked with when it came to looking at data, working out what his teammate was doing in the parts where he was faster, copying it, and then finding even more.”

  There was one bit of data that did leave Will mystified through the first half of the year – one area where he couldn’t match Tagliani; namely the straights. “We couldn’t work it out; even if I came onto a straight quicker than Tag and we had exactly the same wing and drag settings on, I’d be slower than him by the end of the straight. Finally, mid-season at Toronto, after practice I said to Rob Edwards, ‘Look, I think I need a new engine because I’m too slow down [the main straights] to Turn 1 and Turn 3.’ Changing engines before they were mileaged out was pretty expensive, so my data engineer really started searching through the details and suddenly we discovered that my left foot had been riding the brake all year. Just a little bit – maybe 10 pounds of pressure – but enough to take the edge off my top-end speed. So annoying . . .”

  Aside from learning not to press both pedals at once, at the end of his first full season Power modestly admitted it had been a steep learning curve.

  “Working alongside Alex helped me realize how much experience you need in the series to get the most out of the car and be a mistake-free driver,” he said. “Now I’m really accustomed to the car . . . I’ve learned what a Champ Car needs to go fast so my feedback has become better and I work really well with my engineer. The last two circuits of the season were ones I raced on last year, so that meant I didn’t waste time and tires in free practice learning the track. All these things came together and we started looking quite strong.”

  He was already the master of understatement. Those final two races of 2006 at Surfers Paradise and Mexico City saw Will Power prove he was the man most able to fill the void in Champ Car’s Big Four – Bourdais, Paul Tracy, Wilson and Allmendinger – now that AJ was switching to NASCAR for 2007.

  Derrick Walker had saved money from Team Australia’s annual budget to send Fry and crew to a seven-post shaker rig for a couple of days to get data on the cars. These rigs allow a team to simulate a wide variety of vertical and lateral forces on their chassis and thus collect data on ideal shock absorber and suspension settings – particularly vital when your drivers have to vigorously use the curbs around the 2.8-mile Surfers track. However, these facilities don’t come cheap and in normal circumstances, a team wouldn’t have spent so much near the end of a season – especially when the Lola chassis was due to become obsolete two races later with the arrival of Champ Car’s new spec Panoz DP01. But Walker realized it was vital to put on a good show for the Australian fans.

  And Power started the process by earning pole position that weekend, to a rapturous reception from his home crowd. It was his first pole in US open-wheel racing . . . and it may have been the last time he looked truly ecstatic about earning P1 in qualifying. Ever since then, a pole position has always left Power with that look of a guy who’s pleased with his afternoon’s work, but who knows the hard part – the bit that pays most points yet also requires most luck – is still to come. Maybe this was the race that taught him that lesson.

  Bourdais, within sniffing distance of his third Champ Car title, would start alongside him on the front row, but through the first stint of the race was able only to track the Australian. Come the pit stops, Power survived a sideswipe on pit lane from Paul Tracy (PT), whose Forsythe Racing crew had desperately tried to jump their man ahead of Power, and the green-and-yellow car emerged from the pits still ahead of Bourdais. Then, on the thirtieth lap, the Frenchman came from a long way back to try and outbrake Power at Turn 3, but instead locked his brakes and slid straight on down an escape road. Power unwittingly turned into the corner just as the Newman/Haas Racing car came slithering past and in the ensuing collision, his front-left suspension broke, along with the hearts of the 100,000 Aussies surrounding the track. After limping around to the pits, repairs were effected but Power was out of contention.

  The anticlimax was too much for Gore who, in the course of a special “extra” post-race press conference, furiously denounced Bourdais as being an unworthy new champion. Power, sitting beside him, was calm and detached, having had half the race in which to turn his anger into weary resignation at seeing a probable win become twelfth place. Walker, who didn’t want any part of the conference, loitered outside the pressroom, deflated but at least able to smile bemusedly at a recent exchange of words with the new triple champ.

  “Old Seabass won’t accept the blame,” shrugged Walker. “He says Will wouldn’t have won anyway because the damage caused by PT had made him slower. I said to him, ‘Did you consider Will might just be going a bit slower to save fuel?’ so he tells me Will wasn’t saving as much fuel as him so he’d have got the lead at the next round of stops . . . I let him moan on and give his excuses, and then I said, ‘Well, thanks to you, we’ll never know.’”

  Saving fuel, extending a stint by a lap or two, allows a driver to sprint at the end of a stint on low fuel, with a lighter car and warm tires. The earlier pitting car is on full fuel so is a heavier car and has cold tires, which makes the car three to five seconds slower, while the car that saved fuel and stayed out gains track position.

  “How does Bourdais know how much fuel I was saving? I was good on fuel,” was Power’s puzzled response afterward, and he similarly dismissed Seb’s theory that the PT clash had slowed him down. “Nah, didn’t make any difference because we hit square-on. It felt a little bit different because some aero pieces had gone missing. But the car wasn’t any slower.”

  For a driver who’d just seen his first win get away, and on home soil too, Power was amazingly calm. The best part of a decade later, he says it was because he expected similar opportunities from there on out.

  “I was upset, definitely, because I’d checked my mirrors and knew he was too far back to try anything that could work – and then Seabass went for it anyway. But I guess I felt it was still early in my Champ Car career and I’d at least shown my speed so I honestly felt there were positives.”

  He’d have to wait three weeks to try and get his revenge, but he didn’t have much of a chance, to be honest; Newman/Haas Racing and RuSPORT had proven the year before they had a clear advantage around the Mexico City circuit. But Power qualified fourth and finished third to score his first Champ Car podium finish, clinch the Rookie of the Year title and slot into sixth in the final points standings. For a weekend that included one very awkward personal note, when Derrick had discovered his star driver was dating his star PR girl (and had been for about half a season), Power had thoroughly redeemed himself.

  Perhaps most enlightening of all for keen race observers had been Power’s pace in the rain during that finale. When the track had just started getting wet and all the drivers were staying on dry-weather slicks, desperately trying to make it to the pit stop fuel window before picking up a set of grooved wet-weather tires, Power was fastest. Then later, once the track was properly soaked and
everyone was running the wet tires, again Power was fastest.

  Give this guy a car equal to the best, and who knew what might happen?

  Chapter 9

  Miss American Pie

  “Without Liz and [her mother] Kathy, I don’t know where Willy P would be,” says Derrick Walker. “Probably still living in a small apartment in Indianapolis with no furniture, only two changes of clothes, and eating his dinner off the largest drum in his drum kit.”

  He exaggerates of course, but there’s no doubt that Elizabeth Cannon was – and, as Elizabeth Power, still is – essential to the fully formed character that is Will Power. Meanwhile, Liz’s mother, Kathy, who lives just fifteen minutes away from the Powers’ North Carolina home, is the kind advisor as well as personal assistant for her son-in-law. Sometimes she adds to the family neuroses, but generally Kathy is the voice of reason, the soul of empathy, and the heart of sympathy – whichever is required at any given moment.

  Only time has allowed Walker to refer to the Will–Liz liaison in such benign fashion. “The pair of them broke all my rules,” he declares in his half-joking and half-glum manner. “My drivers weren’t supposed to try and date my PR lady; my PR lady wasn’t supposed to date one of my drivers. And worst of all, I wasn’t supposed to be the last one to know. In normal circumstances, I’d have fired one of them or both of them!”

  However, “normal circumstances” isn’t a phrase that could ever be applied to the Cannon–Power dynamic, which seems to find new and ever more interesting ways to function while simultaneously running to meet dysfunction. Nothing’s ever simple.

  Elizabeth was born in November 1982 in Plano, Texas, to Bo and Kathy, and less than eighteen months later became the elder sister to twins Matt and Billy. The Cannon family moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, when Liz was fourteen, and Bo made it a family tradition to attend the Indy 500. At Purdue University in Indiana, Liz chose Communication Studies, concentrating on public relations, with a minor in psychology. While there, she signed up to a modeling agency so she could pay for college books and have some spending money; through the agency, she became a grid girl for the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Indianapolis.

  “That was my first up-close experience of racing, doing something on the other side of the fence rather than just sitting in the grandstands,” says Elizabeth. “I followed racing, although I wasn’t a diehard fan, but that experience was exciting. I knew I wanted to do something in PR, and I didn’t know what avenue, but F1 had a lot of appeal because it was international. At that time I’d never traveled outside of the United States.”

  Having graduated from Purdue in 2005, Elizabeth was on the lookout for a job in racing by the time the US Grand Prix rolled around once more in June. Then one day while Kathy was proudly watching her daughter in the 500 Festival Parade in downtown Indianapolis, she started chatting with a lady called Barbara Butz who, it transpired, worked for Bridgestone/Firestone. On being introduced to Liz, Barbara recommended that if she was serious about getting a PR job in racing, she should attend the IRL IndyCar race in Kentucky in August and meet the Firestone folk.

  Liz took her up on her suggestion but realized she was unlikely to find a gig while the season was going. Barbara and another Firestone employee, photographer Dennis Ashlock, recommended she leave it until December to send out her résumé. That, they said, is when teams would start looking around.

  “So I carried on working other jobs,” recalls Elizabeth. “I was a nanny for a family who had triplets and one other little girl – four kids under the age of three! – and then working for Dine magazine in the evenings. Barbara had said she couldn’t picture me being away from home for long periods of time, traveling internationally, so rather than F1, I should look at Champ Car or IndyCar. Well naturally I leaned toward Champ Car because it went to way more appealing venues – San Jose, Australia, Toronto compared with Kansas, Chicago, Kentucky. So I sent my résumé and cover letter to all the Indianapolis-based Champ Car teams and the first letter I got back, just before Christmas, was from Derrick Walker saying he was interested but wouldn’t be looking to hire until the end of February. If I didn’t have anything by then, I should contact him.

  “But in January I got a call from Eric Bachelart, owner of Conquest Racing. I went for an interview and he hired me on the spot – initially just part-time, booking travel, that kind of thing – but at least I had my foot in the door. And then two weeks later he had to let go all his new hires because a sponsor he’d been expecting to come through hadn’t done so. Hired and let go within two weeks! I was devastated but I suppose it gave me a first taste of how US open-wheel racing goes.”

  When it rains it pours: a couple of weeks later Elizabeth broke up with her boyfriend of two years and also fell sick – sinus infection, bronchitis and strep throat. It was the end of February before she was better – and time to call Derrick as promised. Again she got hired on the spot, and the boss gave her a tour of the shop.

  “We were walking along the balcony that looks down into the shop, and sitting down by the car was Will and Brandon Fry. They looked up, as did all the other crew guys [readers should insert a knowing, ‘Mm-hmm’ in here], and saw this blonde girl who, with her heels on, was about two heads taller than Derrick. Anyway, Will smiled and kept looking, very unsubtly, and I could just see these big wide eyes underneath his shaggy shoulder-length mop of hair. Derrick noticed and shook his head at Will – ‘Don’t even think about it!’ – then looked at me – ‘Never gonna happen!’”

  Elizabeth’s first chance to speak with Power came the following week, on her first official day at Walker Racing.

  “It was raining hard and I didn’t have my umbrella in the car when I pulled up,” she says, “and obviously I didn’t want to have my hair all messed up on my first day. All I could find to wrap over my head was a big plastic Walmart sack, and so I put that on and then ran into the entrance lobby, and there’s Will. He just looks up, doesn’t say anything, but has this look on his face like, ‘Who the hell is this freak?’ I remember thinking, ‘Jeez, he’s so rude! What the heck is he staring at?’ Eventually I came to realize that’s the way he looks at everyone when he first meets them.

  “Anyway, he didn’t say much, just carried on staring, and then told me he was one of Derrick’s drivers. And I’m afraid when he told me his name, sure enough, I had to say, ‘Are you serious? No way. That’s gotta be your stage name.’ He wasn’t amused and told me he was named after his great grandfather, William Stephen Power. Okay, dude, whatever.”

  By the end of the conversation (such as it was), Elizabeth had identified an endearing quality in Mr William Stephen Power Jr but denies it was attraction.

  Anyway, she soon had no time for such matters. Her father Bo suffered a stroke in the five-week gap between Long Beach and Houston, the first two rounds of Champ Car’s 2006 season.

  “I didn’t go to Long Beach because Derrick wasn’t sure if I was going to be the PR person for Team Australia or just be based in the Walker Racing office/race shop. But he had Kathi Lauterbach [longtime PR lady of Newman/Haas Racing] assess me, and with the proviso that I was inexperienced, Kathi basically gave her approval, so Derrick had told me Houston would be my first race.

  “Then, after his stroke, my dad was told he’d need quadruple bypass surgery, which he received the day before I was supposed to fly with the team to Houston. He made me promise I’d go to the race and Derrick and Rob [Edwards] were great and urged me, ‘See how you feel; if you’re there when the team bus leaves for the airport, then great. If not, we understand.’

  “Well Dad’s operation took all day and by the time we got to see him, it was horrible because he looked like death. He was on a ventilator, had tubes coming out of him . . . he barely looked like Dad. It was so upsetting, and I thought that whatever I had told him, there’s no way I could go now. But then eventually Mom told me, ‘Your dad’s going to be okay, and you promised him you’d go to the race. This is your big chance and you know he’s
going to want to hear all about it . . .’

  “So at 4 am I decided I’d do it . . . and the team bus was due to leave the shop at 5.30. I rushed back from the hospital, showered, packed, raced over to the shop and got there just as Rob was driving the van away. He slams on the brakes and comes back for me. I must have looked great – running on no sleep and crying a lot. Anyway, I get on board, and Will sees me and scoots over to the seat beside me, and he was so good, so sympathetic. And since then, he’s told me he was dying to reach out and hug me that morning.”

  As mentioned in the previous chapter, Power wasn’t at his best in Houston, struck hard by the crippling humidity, and even Texas-born Elizabeth was affected – a situation accentuated, of course, by the stress of recent days. As she got on the team transporter after the first practice session, she saw Will, noticed he seemed severely under-the-weather and asked if he was okay.

  “Oh no, don’t ask me that,” he replied. “I should be asking how you are, and how’s your dad?” His selfless words in the literal heat of the moment touched Liz.

  Almost unbelievably, she would be visiting hospital again before she left Houston. During the race the other Team Australia driver, Alex Tagliani, had something roll under the brake pedal just at the wrong moment, which sent his car head on into a tire-wall. Elizabeth, who was only meeting Tag for the first time that weekend, saw him off to the local hospital. Back in Indy, meanwhile, Bo Cannon was starting to recover.

  It was some time after the third round of the season in Monterrey, Mexico, when Walker called Liz into his office and asked her to please befriend and look after Will Power. It transpired that Derrick’s partner, Craig Gore, was getting crucified in the Australian sports media because this young Aussie driving for Team Australia hadn’t yet delivered a decent result. While Walker and Edwards were experienced racing folk who knew potential when they saw it, and who also exuded patience, Gore was a more spur-of-the-moment kind of guy who wasn’t familiar with the learning curve in Champ Car and thus expected instant results. Walker, sensing that this pressure would only exacerbate Power’s problems while he tried to learn on the job, needed Elizabeth’s help in managing the situation.