The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “Brandon was the right guy for Will in his rookie year,” he says “because Will was a very complicated individual back then. There were a lot of demons in his head, born out of frustration and desperation to succeed, so Brandon’s very calm demeanor had been ideal. But then he went off to Forsythe, and we needed to find someone who could take Will to the next level.”

  Before that could happen, Team Australia and all the other Champ Car squads had their first test with the Panoz DP01s at Sebring. The teams by now had one chassis each and there were dark mutterings from certain team owners and crew members about the build quality of the car. There was a fuel tank issue that made it either tricky to fill, easy to overfill, or both, and there were panels that seemed to vary in dimension and had screw holes in different places on supposedly interchangeable parts.

  “It’s really nice of Panoz to hand-build each part for us instead of making every batch the same,” said one mechanic with heavy sarcasm, “but I wish they’d at least been made by the same guy.” He rolled his eyes. “There’s so much extra work getting all the bits to fit.”

  Walker shrugged off the worries at the time. “I think people just grew so used to the Lola over the years, they’re forgetting that a Lola B2K was a new car once, as well. In fact,” he smiled, “I’m old enough to remember when we got a new car every year . . .”

  And Derrick’s suck-it-up-and-shut-up attitude permeated Team Australia. There were fewer complaints and, crucially, fewer issues down in the green and gold camp, where Power shared his chassis with new teammate Simon Pagenaud, who’d replaced Alex Tagliani. Back then, the Atlantic Series champion was given a US$2 million prize to be spent on a Champ Car ride, and Pagenaud’s 2006 triumph for Walker had made him a lock for the second Team Australia seat in the ‘big cars’ in 2007, at the expense of Tag. Under Edwards’ and Walker’s guidance, Pagenaud would prove a fast study, and certainly quick enough to keep Power on his toes. That wasn’t Will’s primary concern at Sebring, though.

  “Although the guys had given us a well-prepared car as usual, we weren’t fast at all,” recalls Power. “In fact, I think we might have been almost slowest. We’d definitely gone in the wrong direction with the basic setup philosophy of the Panoz, and I remember calling a meeting in Derrick’s office and saying that.”

  The major positive the team could take from Sebring was a new race engineer for Power’s No. 5 car – David Faustino. No, not the dude from Married . . . with Children, but a bright 27-year-old engineer from Spotswood, New Jersey, albeit one with little more Champ Car experience than Power. Faustino had guided Canada’s Andrew Ranger to fourth in the 2004 Atlantic championship, followed Ranger up to Conquest Racing’s Champ Car team in 2005, and had most recently spent a year engineering Charles Zwolsman, one of Power’s competitors for the 2006 Rookie of the Year title. However, not knowing if Conquest was going to run two, one or zero cars in 2007, Faustino was looking to move.

  “Dave and I exchanged emails and voicemail messages,” says Edwards, “and then inconspicuously we talked to each other at Sebring. When we got back to Indy, we finalized things very rapidly.”

  “Dave was someone who I didn’t know,” says Walker, “but when we interviewed him, I got a sense of what he was all about, what kind of a ‘detail guy’ he was, and overall he struck me as very smart and very serious-minded. And, as it turned out, his work ethic was and is absolutely faultless. Basically, he was the right kind of guy for our team overall and, boy, when you saw him and Will work together, things really started cooking.”

  “Yup!” smiles Power. “As usual, Derrick knew exactly what he was doing. I think it was after the first meeting between Dave and me, Dave said something like, ‘I’ve never met a driver who wants to win even more than I do.’ He could see I was obsessed and I think that fired him up in a similar way, so it was a great combination right from the start. The second test with the DP01 was at MSR Houston [a 2.38-mile road course about forty minutes from Houston proper] and that time we were quickest.

  “I remember when the crew was making damper changes and I said to Dave, ‘Don’t tell me what the changes are, or how they’re supposed to affect the car; I want to tell you.’ So I went out and did a couple of laps and came back and told him they were doing this and this, and they made the car feel like this, and Dave said, ‘Good, yeah, that’s right.’ I wasn’t trying to show off; I really wanted to know – and wanted Dave and the team to know – if my read on the setup and my feedback was tuned in to the new car.”

  The positive momentum continued at Laguna Seca for the final preseason test. The Team Australia cars were reliable and swift (Power and Pagenaud were second and fifth fastest), and so things appeared to be going to plan. This was confirmed in the best possible way a month later at the opening round of the 2007 season, a race held on the streets in the old-school end of Las Vegas, on circuit designer Tony Cotman’s masterpiece. The 2.44-mile layout incorporated high-speed sections (185 mph), low-speed 90-degree corners, and a famous chicane that, until it was resurfaced after the first day of practice, saw cars launching into the air before heading through a tunnel. The track’s average speed was 113 mph – faster than the classic street courses of Surfers Paradise and Long Beach – and Vegas was also wide enough to pass.

  After brushing a wall during Friday’s qualifying session, Power sorted himself out on Saturday by taking pole, almost nine-tenths of a second faster than anyone else. Although Paul Tracy, who joined him on the front row, got the best of Will on a Lap 2 restart, on Lap 11 the Team Australia car surged back to the front going into Turn 1. PT was good at intimidation tactics and squeezed hard but left enough room down the inside – he’d always respected Power – and thereafter the two pulled away. Will was driving smart, knowing he had pace in hand but nursing his tires and keeping just out of range of the 2003 Champ Car title winner. Once various alternative strategies had played out, the fast guys were back in front and Power was able to win apparently quite comfortably. It was the first time an Australian had won an Indy car race, it was Walker Racing’s first victory in eight years, and it had occurred on 8 April, Derrick Walker’s sixty-second birthday.

  It was also Faustino’s first win, although he admits it wasn’t a surprise. “We’d been quick in testing, and Will and I had clicked straight away – not just our desire to win, but also understanding each other,” he recalls. “So we saw no reason why we wouldn’t be able to compete for victories right away. We felt we might even be ahead, although in the full knowledge that Newman/Haas and maybe a couple of other teams had the ability to catch up pretty quickly. So our pace was very good in Vegas, but there were question marks over reliability with a new car. In practice the fuel tank issues caught up with us and I remember we also managed to set the brakes on fire. And actually we had a refueling issue on the last stop in the race – we weren’t able to fill the tank, so we had to tell Will to hang back a little to save fuel.”

  “Yeah, you could say we were a bit lucky reliability-wise,” agrees Edwards. “Simon had a leaking fuel cell, so if that had been in Will’s car, we wouldn’t have won. Actually, that was a bit of a theme through the year: we kept proving what a thin line it was between victory and defeat, and quite often – too often, unfortunately – we were the wrong side of it. I think everyone on the team would agree there were quite a few races we should have won but didn’t.”

  A human tragedy soon unfolded that would take Power’s mind off the afterglow of victory in Vegas and render racing a distant triviality. Bo Cannon, the strong man who’d survived a quadruple bypass and overcome the complications caused by hospital equipment being left inside his body, was struck down again, and this time there was no coming back.

  As Elizabeth recalls: “While I was away in Houston, which was the third round of the season, my dad, who was back home in Indy, was making a sales call to one of his customers and he started forgetting who he was talking to and his speech turned slurred. The customer was a friend of Dad’s and knew som
ething was wrong so he called my mom, who by then was working for Will as his PA, and told her what happened, so she called an ambulance and rushed to his aid.

  “I’d been trying to talk to Mom all day – when she’s not around, I text her a thousand times – and finally right before the race, I got through, we talked, and she brought me up to date and told me Dad was back in hospital.

  “A guy called Vince Kremer, who was working for Minardi [ex-F1 Minardi team owner Paul Stoddart had partnered with Keith Wiggins’ HVM Racing team that year in Champ Car], put me on the team plane and I flew back to Indy that night, rather than my scheduled flight the following morning. I was able to see my dad, hug him and he told me he loved me and how proud he was of me. It was such a relief. And some days later, he got let out of hospital.

  “Well a few days after that we were all due to travel to Lafayette, because my twin brothers Billy and Matt were graduating from Purdue University and we were all helping move them out of their fraternity house. My parents stopped at Will’s apartment to see us and then we were traveling up in loose convoy, about twenty minutes after them. Suddenly I got a call from Mom, hysterical, because Dad had had a massive heart attack in my brothers’ frat house and he’d collapsed in their arms. Will gassed it and we arrived just as the ambulance was leaving, so we fell in behind it. Will was driving and would not stop for anything; he was glued to the bumper of the ambulance and so we were running red lights, and unfortunately our headlights were lighting up the inside of the ambulance and we could see the paramedics working on Dad. Oh my, it was just horrible.

  “At the hospital the whole family gathered and then the doctor called us all into the waiting room, and I could tell by his face what he was about to say. But there’s no preparation for that kind of news, is there? So when he told us Dad had died, we all just collapsed. I mean, completely and utterly dissolved. You see this kind of scene in a hundred movies but you don’t ever expect to live it. Thank goodness Will was so strong and supportive.”

  “That was the worst day of my life, without question,” sighs Power. “Walking into the hospital and going into that room . . . I remember expecting them to say that Bo was going to be okay, so when they said that he’d died, it was like taking a massive punch to the gut; honestly, I was literally stunned for a few seconds. And then I looked around at this tight-knit, loving family trying to deal with the shock and grief of losing their leading member, and, man, it was just heartbreaking.”

  There’s a long pause, as Elizabeth tearfully gathers her thoughts and arranges her memories.

  “It’s kind of a blur, to be honest. And I know this sounds really strange now, but after hearing that news – I can’t remember how long after – we went straight from the hospital back to my brothers’ residence and carried on moving their stuff out. I guess we were just trying to keep physically occupied even though our minds were all over the place. I don’t know.

  “Will’s parents were so kind over the next few awful days, sending fruit baskets and flowers – I mean, they’d never met Will’s ‘American family’ but they were so sympathetic. We were very touched by how much they empathized with this group of people who they didn’t really know. And then I remember Dad’s funeral: so many of the Walker Racing crew turned up, even though they’d never met Bo and they’d only known me for a year.”

  And there, among the team members, was Will. He hadn’t felt it was right to sit with the family, as he was still trying to keep his and Elizabeth’s relationship on a professional level.

  “I know, now that we’re married, that seems so trivial, doesn’t it?” says Liz. “It upset me at the time because Will had been so good for me and Mom through all the distress and heartache. And it’s sad also because I know Dad would have wanted Will to sit with the family. He’d really been impressed with Will, both as a person and also as a driver. Especially after the win in Vegas a month earlier, Dad would say things like, ‘That boy’s going places,’ and, ‘I can see him driving for a team like Penske one day.’ At least Dad got to a race – Road America in 2006, when Rob Edwards was great and arranged for him to have a golf-cart and made sure he was happy in hospitality and so on – and he also lived long enough to see Will win a race.”

  Bo Cannon died on 5 May 2007, and mercifully for those he left behind, his passing coincided with a strange six-week gap between rounds three and four of the Champ Car calendar. That allowed the relatives to mourn together, along with the Aussie kid who’d been a rock for the family throughout. There’s no doubt that were he alive today, Bo would have been among Will Power’s most ardent supporters, advising and encouraging him through thick and thin.

  And Power could have really used Bo’s encouragement through the first half of 2007, because victory in Sin City hadn’t opened the floodgates. Podiums at Long Beach and Mont-Tremblant, and a fourth place at Portland, were offset by Houston, which was a mess of his own making, losing his nosewing on Justin Wilson’s car and his replacement nosewing on Mario Dominguez’s car. Elsewhere, his downfalls were the result of bad luck. For instance, the cones that marked the corner apexes at Cleveland knocked a valve stem off his tire while he was leading a Walker Racing 1-2.

  “That was such a pisser,” says Power, “because we had outpaced Bourdais. I’d been pressuring him but was also able to save fuel and go one lap longer than he did, which allowed me to jump ahead after the first pit stop. And then something stupid like that happens. Other teams had shortened valve stems for exactly the reason we retired, and we didn’t know about them. It was really disappointing because we should have won that race.”

  Despite racing and results being all that mattered on the surface, Team Australia was now floating on murky financial waters. Walker had used his own line of credit to purchase the new Panoz cars because sponsor payments had slowed down so much. Now they were at crawling pace, Derrick was running out of options regarding how to pay his staff, and there were times when he worried they wouldn’t make the next race. He tried to ensure the crew members were unaware of this ongoing and escalating issue, but Elizabeth and Rob Edwards were his confidants.

  “Before the fourth race of the season in Portland, I was in England for a personal matter,” says Edwards, “and I remember talking to Derrick on the phone. He was saying there was a chance we weren’t going over to Oregon because of lack of funds. We tried to keep it from the rest of the team because obviously we didn’t want an unsettled environment for everyone, but ultimately these things come out.”

  Power knew something was wrong, if not the extent of the problem. Way back in 2006 there had been times when Derrick couldn’t pay him on time, and more of the same in 2007 wasn’t helping his peace of mind. The job security Will had felt at the start of 2006 for the first time in his career had been just an illusion, his new home a house of cards.

  “Yes, and that was just looking at it long term,” Elizabeth points out. “In the short term it was becoming very difficult too, because Will, just like anyone else, had bills. You know, everyone thought or assumed he was getting paid and we had to keep up that illusion out of loyalty to Derrick, but you can imagine the pressure that put on Will, just on a day-to-day basis. And then, on a whole different level, there was the idea that here was a driver putting his life on the line in a 200 mph racecar and he wasn’t getting paid for it, despite his contract.”

  Quite typically of Power, he doesn’t remember it in those terms unless you prod him. Instead, he recalls recognizing the team was being starved of resources, and was therefore losing its competitive edge.

  “I think we’d missed one or two opportunities to test,” he says, “which meant we were always going to be up against it trying to take on teams like Newman/Haas. Looking back, you’ve got to say it was pretty much only the quality of the team that Derrick had put together at Walker Racing that was keeping us competitive.”

  True, although he underplays his own and Dave Faustino’s roles in helping the team punch above its weight.

  �
�Yeah, I was aware of what was going on,” recalls Faustino, “but I’d come from Conquest Racing, so I knew what it was like to work with limited resources! The good thing about Derrick was that he stuck to his principles, a racer’s principles, and did the right things: he hired fast drivers and did whatever he could to fund development. If there was a part that we said we absolutely needed, he’d bend over backward to try and make it happen. I think he did the best he could possibly do on the budget – or credit – he still had.”

  Which is why, when Power scored his second win, on the rain-lashed streets of Toronto, it meant that he, Bourdais and Formula 1 test driver Robert Doornbos (driving for Minardi–HVM) entered the second half of the season covered by just three points at the head of the championship table.

  “Yeah, I thought we had a chance of the championship at that stage,” recalls Will, “but then dumbass things started to go wrong all over again. At Edmonton I was on pole but I had a huge strip of paint in front of me on the grid, which meant it was really slippery when you put the power down, so I knew I’d get smoked by Bourdais off the standing start. Ultimately it didn’t matter though, because the steering rack just got heavier and heavier until it just locked up and I couldn’t turn anymore.

  “In San Jose I got badly held up in qualifying so I had to come through from twelfth to fourth. At Road America we had a gearbox failure about half-distance, although we struggled in the race anyway because we couldn’t get the red [softer, grippier-compound] tires to work. And then the trip to Europe [two races, at Zolder in Belgium and Assen in Holland] didn’t go very well. I think that’s where having the right floor on the car would have made a lot of difference . . .”

  The right floor? Huh?

  “Oh, yeah . . . I guess no one outside the team knows about this,” says Power. “About three races into the season we noticed my pushrods always showed 200 pounds less front downforce than Simon’s and the team couldn’t figure out why. I think eventually we just assumed there was a sensor issue or something like that and it got forgotten about, or it wasn’t a priority. Anyway, we were tight on money so I’m not sure we did any testing until just before the Surfers race again, almost the end of the season. During that test we swapped pushrods on mine and Simon’s car and there was no difference – still my car was reading 200 pounds less front downforce. We were like, ‘What the hell?’ Obviously it wasn’t a pushrod sensor issue.