The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  Faustino can confirm that. “We did a road course test at Sebring, an oval test at Homestead, then raced at Homestead and then went back to St Petersburg for the second race. I think there was just one guy at KV who’d worked in the Indy Racing League so had some knowledge of these Dallaras. Luckily, Ganassi had sold us a reasonable car – Chip was very honorable about not giving us a pile of junk. There were some real horror stories about the cars that some of the IRL teams had sold to the ex–Champ Car teams . . .”

  Solid cars, yes, but not fast in basic form and so Power and new teammate Oriol Servià, an eight-year veteran of the top level of US open-wheel racing, weren’t going to be running up front on ovals.

  Admits Faustino: “Us ex–Champ Car engineers had no understanding of the level of detail we needed to go into to get the last bit of performance from these cars on an oval . . .”

  “Total joke,” adds Power. “We didn’t know what we needed to do to these cars on ovals to give them some feel and then we discovered they didn’t have any! They were so planted by downforce they were just numb. Anyway, I qualified near the back at Homestead and then I crashed in the race in the first couple of laps. And I remember just being happy . . .”

  “The ex–Champ Car guys were basically just there to stay out of the way of the IRL elite,” observes Elizabeth, who stayed at home for that opening round, since she had no job in the merged series. “They weren’t experienced on ovals – Will had done just one oval race before that – and neither were most of their engineers. And of course these cars were new to them. After Will crashed, they interviewed him on TV and I’ve never before or since seen him more relieved to have a DNF [Did Not Finish]! When he rang me, he said, ‘Thank God for that. The car felt horrible and it was so slow.’”

  That’s putting it mildly. New teammate Servià was the top ex– Champ Car driver/team to finish that race . . . twelfth and lapped five times by the winner, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon. Had there been no yellow flags to bunch up the field that evening, he’d have been seven or eight laps behind.

  “Sounds about right,” says Power, shaking his head in wonder. “The ovals were tough all year, because if your car was slow, there was nothing a driver could do about it because we were flat-out all the way around. Once we had a handle on basic setup, it was almost laughable because you’d drive out of the pits and be foot-to-the-floor on your first flying lap but you’d have these IRL guys drive by you because their team had done more work on fairings or had low-resistance gearbox oil or something. We felt helpless. Helpless and hopeless.”

  To a certain extent, the teams had guessed this would be the case going into the merged series. Just as everyone in the Indy Racing League had watched Champ Car races on TV in previous years, so the road/street racers had watched the almost-all-oval series. They’d observed that despite the cars supposedly being identical, there was a marked difference between the haves and have-nots. As new entrants to the arena, the ex-CCWS squads were always going to fall in the latter camp and become firmly second rank on ovals. The best they could hope for was to flourish in the road and street course races, where driving skill could help compensate for deficiencies in car performance. The first such chance was Round 2, at the street/airport course in St Petersburg, Florida.

  “In the first practice session, it didn’t look too good,” recalls Will. “I wasn’t used to people passing me, but a couple of guys – maybe Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon – came past because my car had a stupid amount of understeer. God it was horrible, and I came into the pits and said, ‘Please, just give me anything to make this thing rotate.’ The crew had to do a lot of changes, but by the time we got to qualifying, we were potentially quickest.”

  IndyCar’s qualifying system on road/street courses was this: two groups of thirteen run separate sessions in Q1. The top six from each group proceed into Q2, and the top six from that group of twelve become the ‘Firestone Fast Six’ who have a final shootout for pole position in Q3. (The duration of each qualifying segment has varied down the years.)

  Says Power: “In Q2, I did a mega time, maybe half a second quicker than anyone. But unfortunately, I overdrove in the Fast Six session, made a couple of mistakes and Tony Kanaan beat me to pole. He’s always been good at that track. I was a bit pissed with myself at the time, but actually I think it was pretty cool that we were basically up to speed already.”

  The race turned into a lottery thanks to strategy changes caused by wet/dry track conditions, and Power came home eighth, behind such luminaries as Hideki Mutoh . . .

  “Yeah, should have known then that it was the start of a shitty season,” says Will.

  That’s not entirely true. He did win the thirty-fourth edition of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, and so forever Will Power will be remembered as Champ Car’s final race winner. So too – appropriately – will the co-owner of Champ Car.

  “I took that car at the end of the day and put it in my collection,” says Kalkhoven. “I refused to even let it be cleaned. It was exactly as it came off the track. The merger was important, it was the right thing to do, but my emotions for Champ Car and those cars were still strong, so Will’s victory that day was a very fitting way to go out.”

  Vasser, who’d retired from racing two years earlier at the same event, came out of retirement to drive a third KV entry alongside Power and Servià, padding out the field for this Champ Car finale. That gave him a fresh perspective on what his Aussie employee was doing in his car.

  “Will could brake really late and really hard, and immediately get off the brakes and keep the rolling speed going through the apex,” he recalls. “He’d turn in still carrying a tremendous amount of rolling speed and then deal with the insecurity at the rear, because obviously that kind of aggression upsets the car. But he could do that consistently, lap after lap. He’s just one of those freaks of nature, man.”

  The freak himself remembers a mix of emotions that weekend, not because of it being a farewell to Champ Car, but for a more personal reason.

  “I was pleased to win,” says Will, “but it wasn’t a good event overall. There was the thing between me and Liz, who was working with Derrick for that race.”

  Walker, with nothing to lose now, had entered a car – still dolefully and ironically colored in the old Team Australia green-and-yellow – under the Walker Racing banner, with Alex Tagliani on driving duty. Alex had done a wonderful job to qualify on the front row alongside polesitter Justin Wilson in the Newman/Haas Racing car but, come the race, the Canadian veteran had had to cede best to Power, who strode into the distance. Meanwhile, Tagliani’s fading front tires eventually sent him tumbling down to seventh.

  And Elizabeth Cannon stood by the Walker Racing pit stand at the end of the race, crying her eyes out, not from joy that her boyfriend had won but from bitterness that her boss had lost. It was a striking and unforgettable display of loyalty.

  “I’m happy for Will in retrospect because he’s had so much bad luck in races since then, especially at Long Beach,” says Liz seven years later, “but that day was heartbreaking. Day to day, week to week, I was living in hell with Derrick and Rob and the few remaining staff in this shell of a race shop that just a few months earlier had been operating a championship-contending team. Derrick had become like a dad to me and each day I had to see him at his absolute lowest. An awful time for him.

  “Then, with that being the final Champ Car race ever, it was his last chance to show what he could do as a team owner, and we’d really got our hopes up when Tag qualified at the front. And Alex did his best; he drove really well that weekend, kept pressure on Will for a lot of the race. But it just didn’t work out. I remember when the race finished, Derrick, Rob, myself, the crew . . . we were just looking around but trying not to look at each other, all of us knowing it was all over.”

  “Liz was very, very loyal to Derrick,” says Power, “so after that win, she was gutted, and I can understand. I’d won for ‘the enemy’ sort of thing, and sh
e didn’t know what the future was with Walker Racing. So, yeah, not good. We almost broke up around that time.”

  Soon, though, Liz’s loyalty to her boyfriend kicked back in. It had to, because a run of six straight ovals had ended with a best finish of ninth for Will at Iowa Speedway. None of the ex–Champ Car teams had their cars dialed in to ovals, so they were neither fast nor tame once running in the aero turbulence caused by twenty-four other cars on track. And Power could hardly help guide the KV engineers to improve matters, given his lack of experience of these cars or tracks.

  “I remember Will’s first practice run for the Indy 500,” says Kalkhoven chuckling. “His eyes were literally as big as saucers at the sheer speed and the fact it never slows down around there. He sat on the pit wall and could barely speak. But I think we [team management] recognized that oval races were where car setup was most critical, and therefore there was only so much the driver could do. We didn’t have the experience and neither did he.”

  “Will just had a negative attitude toward the ovals at that stage,” says Vasser, “even Indy. And honestly, I think he almost lost it, mentally. We were not giving him good cars for the ovals, which didn’t help: he was literally hanging on for dear life in these big packs of cars running two inches apart, and the best he could hope for was maybe tenth or twelfth. He couldn’t see the point.

  “The savior in this was Servià. He’s such an easy-going guy and had some oval experience – although powerful CART-era Indy cars, not IRL – so he was able to help guide us as a team but also advise Will. That’s where their friendship started, and thank God, because I think myself and [team manager] Mark Johnson were struggling to keep Will’s head in the game on ovals.”

  “Ovals are not easy and you have to learn to love them first before you attack them too hard,” says Servià. “You really need to listen to the car in a different way than on road courses. I was really lucky because in my Indy Lights years I had Casey Mears as a teammate, [his father] Roger Mears as team manager and [his uncle] Rick Mears as advisor. I could not have had better teachers! So in 2008 I tried to share all I could with Will. Of course, since then he has learned from the master Rick himself at Penske.”

  It was vital to team progress that the drivers got along and shared all information, but that depended on trust, and at first Power eyed Servià warily during debriefs: was this guy for real? Will was suspicious and very, very guarded.

  “Yes, and rightfully so!” declares Servià. “Racing stops being a game very early on, even at lower levels. Teammates will often not help – more the opposite – and even engineers or mechanics that are supposed to be on your side can turn against you very quickly when things are not going well if it means they save face with the boss. That is the nature of the beast and why it’s not so simple to have teams actually work as teams. But when it happens it is an immediate recipe for success.

  “When Will and I were put together, it wasn’t really a planned ‘sport’ decision; it was part of a bigger business plan between Kalkhoven and Gore, and we happened to be two racing pieces in it. I knew he was a bloody quick driver but I truly didn’t know what to expect in terms of personality or how much of a team player he might be. All I knew from the contact we had preseason was that he was reserved but also blunt.

  “Then when the season started, I realized he was very untrusting of me, in the typical way you find between European racing teammates. Yeah, it’s funny that I am the European one, but by that time I had already raced in America for ten years and had experienced the advantages of when teammates work together. Given the stiff competition we were facing as we joined IndyCar from Champ Car, and having to learn so much that was new, I knew that our only chance of being successful was if we were pulling the whole team as one.

  “So I had to go with an extremely open approach to gain his trust. I guess it is like in any relationship – if you want somebody to trust you, you need to lower your defenses and risk getting bitten.

  “I’d say it took around four races, but then he did come around, because he saw that I was honest and quickly realized the benefits of working together. After that, we had a similar rivalry to the sort that exists between brothers, where there’s nobody else in a chess contest you want to beat more than your brother, but at the same time there’s nobody else you would rather see getting to the finals with you. I think we became the best of the teams that had transitioned from Champ Car; we beat Newman/Haas in the process, and they had been unbeatable in Champ Car.”

  After that long run of literally hopeless oval races came a venue where Power should have been okay – at Watkins Glen, the beautiful and demanding natural road course in upstate New York – but in Will’s own words, “I had a really good chance of pole, we were very fast, and then I put it in the wall.”

  Says Elizabeth: “I remember that was the race Kalkhoven pulled me aside thinking Will and I must have been fighting and that’s why he’d made a mistake. But it wasn’t that. Will had just put too much pressure on himself to perform there because of the bad results from the ovals. He had this ‘it’s now or never’ kind of approach to the road and street courses because he knew that was his only chance to shine.

  “On top of that, the race at Surfers Paradise was in limbo, and because of the Team Australia marketing strategy, that had a major bearing on KV and Will’s future there. When Kevin showed me a text on his phone that said the Australia race probably wasn’t going to happen, I realized that even if it went ahead – and eventually it did, as a non-championship event that year – there were question marks over the race going forward. That suggested to me that the Team Australia concept was in jeopardy, and therefore Will was on shaky ground. So I tried to encourage him to start looking around for another ride for 2009.”

  “I still think losing Surfers Paradise was extremely detrimental to the series,” says Kalkhoven. “It was a phenomenally successful event that matched Indy 500 crowd figures over the three days. And it was embedded in the psyche of everyone on the Gold Coast by then. Why on earth would you choose to ditch something that was such a major hit? Made no sense.

  “To Elizabeth’s point, she’s right. Neither Will nor Oriol had brought sponsorship money – that season was basically funded from my own pocket – and attracting new sponsors was hard. Anyone spending that kind of sum on racing was going to do their research and realize that a team new to these rules, new to oval racing, was going to be at a disadvantage. So the odds were stacked against us. I’d have given my right arm to keep Will if we could have found a sponsor.”

  Kalkhoven’s not-unreasonable requirement of KV Racing – that it become a self-sustaining entity in his business portfolio – would necessitate taking on pay-drivers in 2009, and thus Elizabeth’s sense of foreboding about Will’s future there was spot on. And while it took Power a couple of months to proactively follow her advice to seek alternative employment, he right away took on board what she’d said and all its implications.

  Now, the number of drivers who perform at their best when they think they’re fighting for their ride is smaller by far than the number whose driving turns ragged under that sort of pressure. And at that stage of his career, Power was definitely in the latter category.

  “I tell you, it was a shitty year,” he insists. “Obviously there was no satisfaction on ovals, and every time I looked like I’d be at the front on a road or street course, I’d screw it up, just by overdriving. I was desperate to show what I could do because I knew it was the last year of my contract and that puts you in a bad situation mentally. Back then, I wasn’t very good at shutting that stuff out of my head when I got into the car.”

  “We were both just trying really hard, driving over the edge at all times,” shrugs Servià. “Will crashed more than I did but only because he would try to redefine physics! Sometimes he would get away with it, but other times he didn’t. I had more experience and I knew when and when not to take my chances. But even on the non-ovals I can proudly claim we outqualifie
d each other four times each, and to this day no other teammate has been able to accomplish that percentage in a season with Mr Power!”

  He’s not wrong on any point. Servià, even in Champ Car, had been one of the best at using his very rational brain to make the best of a bad situation, in the manner of a Bobby Rahal or Al Unser. Will, by contrast, was having one of those seasons where desperation led to poor results, which led to more desperation.

  “The speed was there,” agrees Power, “but on paper, my results looked horrible. So many mistakes and things going wrong. Detroit – again, mega quick in qualifying, probably fast enough to go to the Fast Six, and I only put one quick lap on my tires in Q1. But again during that session I slid into a wall and bent the suspension. The KV guys tried to quickly change the wishbone and get me out for Q2 but it wasn’t possible in the time between qualifying segments. Another race where we should have been racing for the win but I’d left us in twelfth in qualifying.”

  “Will had put this totally unfamiliar car on the front row back in St Pete,” says Faustino, “and a lot of practice sessions he was right there, mixing it with the best teams. But yes, there were a few mistakes. And it was hard for me to say why they were happening because, remember, it was only our second year together so I didn’t know what Will Power’s ‘normal’ was quite yet. I knew the potential was there, but I didn’t know if the mistakes were a pattern. I didn’t know if that was just him figuring out the new car, or what.

  “It was only at the end of the year when I realized what pressure he’d been under. The mistakes on ovals were a bit more understandable: before that season, he’d done one oval race in his life, Milwaukee in 2006, and obviously Milwaukee is the one oval that behaves like a fast road course. So that was of limited use to us on these banked 1.5-milers . . . and with a totally different car.”

  Or as Vasser puts it: “If you’re an IndyCar driver, you’ve got to accept that you have all these vastly different types of tracks, and you’ve got to embrace that diversity. You’ve got to learn to love ’em all, otherwise you need to be looking at yourself in the mirror and asking, ‘Is this for me?’