“So then they changed floors and, boom! Problem solved. Now Simon’s car was missing downforce. Basically, bad quality control had meant there was a big difference in the manufacture of the floors and I’d had 200 pounds less downforce than Simon all year! When you think about the long corners on road courses, it explains why we’d always been missing something compared with people like Bourdais. Anyway, we left it with my car having the better floor and in the final two races, I was the absolute pace setter.”
“I think the DP01 had been built in two batches of ten,” explains Faustino, “so each team had one delivered early, and after initial testing, we all reported back to Panoz any issues we’d spotted. The problem areas were changed and improved on the second batch of ten. Well Will had one of the early cars, and the vortex generators weren’t quite where they needed to be. It was maddening, but that’s spec racing for you: if even a small detail is out, it can have big consequences.”
“Seriously, 200 pounds!” exclaims Power. “You can’t believe how hard you have to work to find that much in normal circumstances. And underbody downforce is very, very efficient, doesn’t cause much drag. At the time, I was just relieved because there’d been a couple of tracks before where Simon was ahead of me on the grid and I couldn’t figure out why he was able to do certain things with his car that I couldn’t do with mine. Now, though, I do wonder what would have happened if we’d found out about this floor problem earlier. You can bet Newman/Haas were onto it right from the start of the year.”
“Yeah, definitely they were throwing more money at things,” says Faustino. “They weren’t mileaging parts out and risking a problem; they’d change stuff early, which wasn’t a luxury we had so our mechanical reliability wasn’t so great. I don’t know if we could have won the championship, to be honest, but we should have finished second to Bourdais, instead of fourth.”
If the European races had killed off Power’s hopes of the Champ Car title, Surfers Paradise, the season’s penultimate round once more, offered the chance of an awesome consolation prize. Not that it was a given that Team Australia would be there . . .
“Ugh! Honestly, you didn’t know from week to week what might happen,” says Elizabeth, shaking her head. “Before Road America, again there was the threat of not making it to the race because of a lack of funding. Derrick still confided in me and Rob with all the day-to-day ups and downs, and we were still having to keep it from everybody out on the shop floor. This was their livelihood and they shouldn’t have to work under that pressure. It was a horrible time.”
However, Team Australia did make it down to its “home race”. And now that he was a strong contender for pole at almost every race, there was no surprise at either Power’s pole position or even his four-tenths-of-a-second margin of superiority. The footage of his qualifying run, easily found on YouTube, is breathtaking, because there’s not a single corner where you could imagine any of his peers being more committed and shaving off more time.
“Will wasn’t just closing his eyes and being an animal through that triple chicane at the back of the circuit,” agrees Faustino, referring to the spot where the bravest drivers such as Paul Tracy were gaining huge chunks of time. “Will was picking up little bits of time everywhere, and that lap . . . it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, that’s for sure.”
But yet again, the local hero’s race turned sour, despite leading from the start. A full-course caution bunched the field and prompted everyone to pit together for new tires and a fuel top-up. As Power was sent out of his pit box, young Mexican driver David Martinez (partnering Paul Tracy that weekend) was arriving in his Forsythe pit box, located just ahead. Sharp contact between the two caused the Team Australia car to stall, the crew had to drag Will back to restart it, and by the time the No. 5 emerged from the pits it was buried deep in the pack with a driver eager to make up for lost time.
Over-eager? Walker thought so as he saw his car retire on the nineteenth lap after a collision with Katherine Legge’s Dale Coyne Racing machine that broke a small bone in Power’s left hand. “We as a team cost Will the win but he cost himself a strong finish,” chided the team boss.
Perhaps still carrying some lingering anger inside, Power’s qualifying run at the season finale in Mexico City was very special.
“I still think that was one of the best laps I ever did,” he sighs. “That course was so technical, so much fun, and I can honestly say I think I nailed it. That lap, I think I got everything there was to get. No driver can say they’ve done the perfect lap but I think that was maybe the closest I’ve ever come to getting every corner just right. And I have to give Dave a lot of credit because he found some things in the data where I could improve. He was saying, ‘Look, on your out-lap from the pits on colder tires, you’re quicker through this corner than you are at any other time in the session.’
“I was like, ‘What?!’ And yeah, he was able to show me a couple of places where on a hot lap, I was carrying too much speed into a corner, overdriving it.
“So in qualifying I under-drove the entry to those two problem corners – or it felt like I was under-driving them – and those were the last pieces I needed to build a great lap. Like I say, I’m sure it wasn’t perfect, but also I knew – honestly, I knew – that there was no way anyone was going to beat it.”
Indeed not. He was six-tenths of a second faster than his closest opposition that day.
Walker chuckles. ‘That’s still one of his great strengths, I’d say. Will’s naturally fast, so he’s got a good basic lap time inside him already, but then he’s always been very good at using practice sessions to hunt for scraps of speed here and there, this corner and that hairpin. He then mentally stores what he’s found, and come qualifying, he’s got each piece tied together to create this one very fast whole lap. I think if you look back, you’ll see Willy Boy is very, very good at not making the same mistake twice. So when he comes into the pits, he knows within a tenth how much he’s missed out there, and on which corners, so he can give good feedback based on what he’s done and also what he thinks he can still find.”
Faustino agrees. “It could – it still can – get frustrating if I’m trying to get feedback on what the car’s doing in a practice session and Will’s busy asking me for data about his driving! But he’s so good at understanding what he’s doing, what his teammate’s doing and what other drivers are doing, and then he actually makes something of it and puts it into practice. It’s amazing that he’s able to retain all that from the practice sessions and then act upon it in the heat of the moment on a qualifying run.”
Great pole though it was at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, come the race that didn’t help him. Bourdais was quicker and even a late full-course caution bunching the field together didn’t give Power a chance. He finished second to the Frenchman in Seb’s final Champ Car race before departing for Formula 1. As things transpired, it would also be Power’s final race as a Team Australia driver – or at least, Team Australia in its Walker Racing form. Two wins, five pole positions and fourth in the championship had been the highlights of his second full season in the Champ Car World Series. Less tangible but no less real was a sentiment now shared by many that Power was the fastest driver in the series.
“I thought that, for sure,” says Faustino. “For the team budget that we had, the fact that we didn’t have as good equipment as Newman/Haas and the lack of experience Will and I had of working together, I thought it said a lot that we had five pole positions, four other front-row starts and two wins. But it wasn’t just speed; we’d learned a lot through our first year together, and I had no doubt in my mind that we were going to make a serious run at the championship in 2008.
“You know, I was actually offered a job at Newman/Haas at the end of the season, and obviously they also needed a replacement for Bourdais. Eventually they chose Wilson. But during the interview, I remember they asked me, ‘Who do you think is The Guy?’ and I said straight away, ‘It’s Will.’ The
y looked a bit surprised and probably thought I was just being loyal to the driver I’d been working with that year. Definitely I could see in their faces that they weren’t sure. But I knew.”
Chapter 11
Bittersweet year
“Flying back from Mexico in 2007, I don’t recall anyone having the feeling that was the last time we’d race as Team Australia,” recalls former Walker Racing team manager Rob Edwards, “but that’s sadly how it transpired.”
For 2008, the Australian funding was switching from Walker Racing to KV Racing, co-owned by Jimmy Vasser and Champ Car World Series (CCWS) co-owner Kevin Kalkhoven. Yet in the grand scale of things, what Kalkhoven was doing behind the scenes that winter was far more significant for the sport as a whole. Tired of pouring countless millions into Champ Car each year, he had reopened talks – long rumored, oft denied and oft collapsed – with Indy Racing League founder Tony George to unite CCWS and the IRL, and this time the pair had come to an understanding.
The merger became public on 22 February 2008. Finally, twelve years since the first race for the IRL breakaway group, there was going to be a united front at the top of US open-wheel racing. As mentioned previously, NASCAR had taken full advantage of the years of dysfunction, but at least reunification was a huge leap in the right direction for this once-proud branch of the sport. No more conflict, no more confusion among the potential sponsors (series and teams) as to which series raced where, no more split loyalties among the fans.
The word ‘merger’ is misleading, however. Champ Car, which had the more sophisticated and demanding car and the more ambitious schedule containing a greater variety of venues, was effectively being taken over by the IRL. Aside from Long Beach, Edmonton and Surfers Paradise, not one of Champ Car’s races would remain on the new IndyCar calendar. The one-year-old Panoz DP01-Cosworth would be used just once more, in the 2008 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, and only because that event’s date clashed with the IRL race down in Motegi, Japan. That would be the last weekend in which IRL and CCWS would race separately, and thereafter the IRL Dallara-Hondas would become the only eligible cars for the united series.
“Going in IRL’s technical direction was a balance-of-cost issue,” says Kalkhoven. “There was a large number of [IRL] Indy cars out there, and the cost of replacing those with Panoz DP01s would have been very significant. Plus the IRL Dallara was tried and proven at the Indy 500 and on all ovals. It was almost a no-brainer to go with the known entity.”
“I had an inkling the discussions between Kevin Kalkhoven and Tony George were finally going to have a real result after years of rumors and false optimism, so I was truly gung-ho about it,” says Derrick Walker. “I’d been part of CART in its heyday – which is how a lot of people describe the first half of the 1990s – so I’ll take my lumps, take my share of the blame for ‘The Split’ and also for helping the breakaway group [most CART teams sold their old chassis to IRL teams at the end of 1995, thinking this splinter group would never last or never become a threat]. But whomever people want to blame for it happening, I think most people would agree – The Split was ridiculous and terrible, and something that American open-wheel racing is still trying to recover from to this day. So I was all for the end of this ugly war.”
Sadly, there were a lot of casualties of peace, including the majority of the Champ Car Safety Team and the admin staff at CCWS. Meanwhile, down in the paddock, among the teams unable or unwilling to make the transition to IRL rules were Forsythe Racing (owned by CCWS co-owner Gerry Forsythe), Rocketsports Racing, Pacific Coast Motorsports . . .
. . . and Walker Racing.
“Yes, that was the ironic thing,” says Walker. “I agreed wholeheartedly in principle, but I couldn’t follow through. When I got wind of the fact that we’d be playing to IRL rules, I rushed out and got two Dallara chassis and I didn’t bother with the Champ Car open test down in Sebring. Why waste money and energy on a car that was about to go out of commission? I was already pitching my tent with this ‘merged series’ and moving on.”
Only in theory. While Walker was one of the first to know of the merger – “Craig Gore had been one of my informants that yes, it was finally going to happen, and I guess he got that direct from Kalkhoven” – Walker was floored to learn that Team Australia would now be at KV Racing, and he’d therefore have to hand over his newly acquired Dallaras.
“Because the funds had dried up completely, I was now heavily leveraged – maxed out, in fact – and that was that,” says Walker. “I had no choice but to give up those cars, and give up running an IndyCar team. There was no way forward.”
“You don’t think of things as dead until they’re dead,” sighs Edwards. “But the day we loaded those cars onto the trailer to take to the KV shop, we knew Derrick had shot every bullet he’d had left in the chamber and that we wouldn’t be racing in IndyCar in 2008. Actually, we did a one-off in Edmonton in conjunction with Vision Racing, running Paul Tracy, and he finished fourth despite having sat out half a season. And that year we also ran Nigel Mansell’s sons in the Atlantic Series. But Walker Racing as an Indy car team ceased to be.”
“It was so depressing – a really terrible time,” says Elizabeth Power, who’d stayed on as part of the team’s skeleton staff after Derrick had to let most of the crew go. “We were burning the midnight oil trying to come up with sponsorship deals, and in between times I was odd-job girl – cleaning toilets, mopping the floor – because Derrick had even got rid of the cleaning lady. He’s always been quite a private man but because he was in such a bad place – worried and bitter, understandably – he’d come down to my office just to vent.
“As you can imagine, Will was torn between loyalty to Derrick and also dedication to his career. He saw things looked impossible at Walker Racing whereas the Team Australia concept was still going, just in a different team, and he was obviously part of the new deal with KV . . .”
To this day, Power cringes at the memory of the agonizing.
“We’d had such good momentum and Derrick was such a great team owner, team manager and boss, I wanted to stay loyal to him,” he says. “At the same time, I was very thankful for the opportunity Craig had given me. That whole Team Australia thing would never have happened without him backing Walker Racing. Showing potential and being Australian is what got me a ride in Champ Car. Without my nationality, I’d have just been another sponsorless driver showing potential, knocking on the doors of team owners.”
With Walker unable to offer any concrete plans for moving forward, Power’s choice was clear: “Jimmy Vasser called and seemed really keen to have me at KV, so that meant a lot coming from an ex-champion [Vasser was CART IndyCar champ in 1996], and Kevin Kalkhoven offered me a reasonable salary.”
“I’d have wanted Will on our team, sponsor or no sponsor,” says Vasser, “particularly if Champ Car had continued. There was still a question mark over a lot of the newer-era road racers coming in – how would they run on ovals? But obviously in Champ Car, there hadn’t been that problem, so after all the speed he’d shown the year before, Power was really coming into his own. I think with him and [Oriol] Servià as our team, we’d have been fighting Newman/Haas for the Champ Car championship that year.”
Even as newbies to the Indy Racing League, the team showed flashes of real promise. Part of that, too, was because Vasser and Kalkhoven had hired Dave Faustino.
“Like I mentioned, Newman/Haas had offered me a job,” says the race engineer who’d already become Robin to Will’s Batman, “and they’d just won a championship and had a really good budget. So it sounded crazy at the time but I turned them down because I wanted to engineer Will Power. My way of looking at it was that I knew Will was going to be committed to Derrick and I didn’t want to miss the chance to give the championship another run with him because I knew we could do it.
“But that was October time, and then things started slipping downhill. We’d never imagined Derrick wouldn’t find a way to continue Walker Racing; he’
s a survivor. But when we heard about the merger, and that it would be to IRL rules, we knew he was going to have to buy a lot of new equipment, and that was going to be very difficult. Impossible, actually. I hung on until the last minute, but I wanted to go with Will, and Derrick was pretty good about that. And to be honest, this late in the off-season, I felt lucky that there was an opening at KV Racing.”
But there was a gigantic task confronting KV, along with all the other ex–Champ Car teams. They had to learn their new cars in just two weeks before the IndyCar season began at Homestead, a 1.5-mile banked oval in Florida.
Says Kalkhoven: “Yes, that was a significant learning curve! But we knew it would be like that, and going the IRL route rather than Champ Car as far as cars were concerned had been the only logical answer when we were trying to make the merger happen for the greater good of US open-wheel racing. Overall, the engineers in Champ Car and in the Indy Racing League were of equal standard, of course, but our guys were new to this Dallara so they were up against it trying to gain ground. The IRL teams gave us some basic setup help and data, but actually applying it in a practical sense was a different challenge and came at us pretty quick.”
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 14
