“The crazy thing is, though, he is like another son to me! That winter of 2007, when he didn’t know whether to stay with Derrick or go to KV Racing, it was horrible watching him agonize. You’ve got to love Will for his honesty and his loyalty. He doesn’t want to do someone wrong because he always feels an allegiance. He was so torn. He was saying things along the lines of, ‘If it wasn’t for Derrick, I wouldn’t be where I am today, but if it wasn’t for Craig Gore agreeing to provide sponsorship to Derrick, I wouldn’t be where I am.’ So that was a difficult decision for him because he felt thankful to both. And that was one of those situations where I felt for him as if he was my son, but I couldn’t advise him because he’s not! And if we’re being honest, I wasn’t sure what he should do, either . . .”
Perhaps inevitably, once Kathy was down in North Carolina, she picked up where she’d left off in Indy, becoming an integral part of the household.
“Trust me, I certainly never intended to be around at their house as many days as I am,” she states, “because I’m certainly not the typical parent who wants to stick their nose in. I don’t take sides if they have an argument. If one of them tries to get me on side to win an argument, I’m very much, ‘I don’t want to know. Leave me out of it.’ And to be fair, that doesn’t happen often. It’s not always sweet – every couple has those bad days when they wind each other up – but Will and Liz are never mad for very long. I think they see their similarities and differences and how well they blend together.
“Liz is so outgoing so I think she’s brought Will out of his shell. But I think he’s done a lot for her, too. For example, she always used to be – like me! – too quick to pass judgment. It’s Will who’s the one that says, ‘Now hang on, do you think it could perhaps have been like this?’ He’s very good at seeing both sides of a story. And him playing devil’s advocate makes her mad sometimes, of course, but he’s very fair and balanced. It’s part of his basic honesty.”
Just as Kathy tries to play a support role rather than take the lead when she’s under the Liz/Will roof, so she tries to fade into the background at the races she attends (about half of them).
“Oh definitely. I was embarrassed at one race because Liz insisted I come up on the Penske bus with her. I’m just not comfortable with anyone thinking I’m there to take advantage. And actually, I think that’s the same policy Will and Liz adopt. Will is very undemanding of the team in terms of . . . well . . . anything, really. For things like travel arrangements and such, quite often it’s Liz who sorts out Will’s itinerary rather than expect the team to do it.”
And so with Liz and Kathy around, Will has some free time in between his workouts and working on things with his race engineer Dave Faustino.
“Yes, he can be relaxed during the season,” says Kathy, “although obviously it’s harder once he gets into that part of the year when the races are back to back to back. He’ll be on YouTube watching music videos, or he’ll be watching TV – usually some type of documentary on one of a wide range of subjects. Then if a race hasn’t gone well, he’ll be downstairs playing on his drum-set for a bit, or singing into his karaoke machine.
“Anyway, then something will suddenly click in him, and he has to go watch footage of a race or study some data or something to do with racing. He says there’s always something he can improve on, something he could have done better in the last race. He’ll blame himself even when he’s not to blame. He’ll always stand by his team and say, ‘Yeah, they made a mistake but maybe I should have done this or this.’ Makes me mad sometimes!”
That loyalty to her son-in-law, that willingness to defend him from an injustice – even if the injustice is being stated by Will himself! – is obviously something Kathy shares with Elizabeth. Without being too sickly sweet about it, the Liz-Will relationship is so very obviously rooted in love, loyalty, and devotion, that some might think their match-up was pre-ordained . . . And if that sounds weird, let Kathy explain.
“Okay, so one day soon after those two started dating, Bo reminded me of how, when she was four or five, Lizzy used to run around the house with a towel hanging from the back of her collar, like a superhero’s cape, and then she’d suddenly stop in her tracks and pose with her little fist in the air and yell, ‘Liz power!’ When Bo said it, I suddenly remembered and then I was just spooked by the coincidence. I mean, that is a little bit freaky, isn’t it? So I was planning to relay this story in my speech at their wedding [in December 2010], but I made the mistake of telling Will about it and he was so amused, he stole it for his speech! He had this big grin on his face and said, ‘Yup, Liz was mine, even then.’”
But in order to explain the role Kathy fills in the lives of Will and Elizabeth, we’ve skipped forward a couple of years. Let’s go back to that winter of 2008/09. Will had been down to Australia for Christmas and had now returned. Kathy had recovered to full health and she was there on the scene to observe the transformation in her son-in-law.
“We thought he’d taken his racing seriously before,” she recalls, rolling her eyes, “but that winter was something else again. You could see the change in him. This was Penske, and Will wanted to do everything exactly right. He’d be representing the biggest name in American racing and some of the biggest companies in America. There had never even been a question in his mind about whether to take a part-time drive with Penske or full-time with someone else, even though at the time, he’d only been guaranteed testing. Just testing for Roger and getting his foot in the door was worth it. This was his chance to prove himself.
“The way I looked at it was that, in the worst-case scenario, even if the team couldn’t find a way to keep him if Helio won his court case, Will might still have (hopefully) a really strong race or two under his belt to help him get another ride.
“But that wasn’t how Will was thinking. He wanted in at Penske, and he knew this was the biggest chance of his life – a bigger chance than most drivers get in their whole careers. He was just incredibly determined to make a big impression.”
Chapter 14
The long audition
Anyone who thought Will Power’s searing speed and strong ethic allied with Team Penske’s top-quality preparation and calming atmosphere was a match made in heaven would be proven right in the medium and long term. In the short term . . . ? Not so much. Early testing at Sebring (road course) and Homestead (1.5-mile oval) did not go to plan.
Sebring International Raceway is an airfield track in east Florida, best known for running one of the world’s most famous sports car races, the 12 Hours of Sebring, around its full 3.74-mile layout. However, as you’ll have noticed in previous chapters, it’s also one of the favored venues for IndyCar testing, and that takes place on the shorter 1.7-mile version of the track. While it would be interesting to see just what lap times an IndyCar could produce around the long-form lap, the runway surface is simply too bumpy for an IndyCar to handle.
By his own admission, Power has never quite gelled with the track – for reasons even he can’t explain – and while fast there, he’s never looked exceptional in the manner seen at other circuits. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that it’s difficult to judge progress at Sebring because the track picks up so much grip over the course of a busy, multi-car test. Even if a driver and his team have gone up a blind alley over the course of the day, a new-tire run at the end of the day, with the track “rubbered in” can still result in a lap time some 1.5 seconds quicker than in the morning.
But that wasn’t the problem for Power in his first test with his dream team. Never mind fast, for half a day he struggled to even look competent.
“I went out and did a lap and the first time I hit the brakes from racing speed, I flat spotted all four tires!” he chuckles. “The pedal travel was so soft, and I had always required a much bigger master cylinder because I hit the brakes so hard. At KV that’s what I’d been used to. And then the Penske car’s handling was kinda edgy compared to what I’d been driving, so my times were slow.”<
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“Oh, I remember that test vividly,” says Tim Cindric. “His first run was a disaster. But then I remembered the interview, and so I thought, well, maybe he’s nervous. And then he gets out of the car, wide-eyed, giving the ‘Will Power Look’ and I’m wondering what’s going on. He says, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t brake, I can’t this, I can’t that.’ So we put him back in the car, and send him back out and he has another run that’s all over the place. Then he radios in to say a dashboard light has flashed on, and as he’s coming down pit road, we ask him which light and he says, ‘I don’t know.’ He gets out and says pointing at it, ‘It was this one. I don’t know what color it is; I’m classified as color deficient.’ Okay . . .
“By this time, it’s lunch break, and Roger calls to see how it’s going with his new driver. I say, ‘Look, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m not sure this is going to work. He’s already gone through a couple of sets of tires. We’re not very fast at all. His braking’s all over the place. He seems really nervous. Oh, and he’s color blind . . .’”
“I just couldn’t understand it,” says Power. “There wasn’t anyone else there, so we had nothing to compare to lap time–wise, and the track wasn’t gaining speed because there wasn’t enough rubber going down on it. In that sort of situation, Sebring can feel pretty terrible so I wasn’t bothered about the times too much. But I knew that wasn’t the problem; it’s just that the feel of the car was not good. It wasn’t feeling sharp and I was looking really inconsistent because I was trying to find a way to make this setup work.”
Thankfully a large part of the problem was solved over lunch break.
Says Cindric: “Whereas these days Will says what he thinks, in that setting, his first test for us, he was very cautious about questioning anybody and so I think he was blaming himself for how the car was. But then we discovered one of the mechanics had put the brake master cylinder in wrong, so the brakes were totally messed up; nobody could have driven the car properly. That was such a big feeling of relief, I couldn’t even get mad at the crew. I just thought, ‘Okay, there’s hope for this kid.’ And you can imagine Will’s sense of relief, too. Anyway, over the remainder of the test, he got better and better.”
If that was one hurdle overcome, there was another still to come: his first oval test with his new (for now, temporary) employers, and in some ways this was more crucial. Everyone at Team Penske knew Power was fast on road and street courses; they’d seen it demonstrated time and again, and it had been one of the major reasons he was hired. But ovals were going to be a work in progress. Even though Power was merely a test driver – no guarantee yet of a race at all – would he be good enough to provide useful feedback to push the team forward on ovals? Chip Ganassi Racing had won seven of the left-turn-only races the previous season, Penske just two, so it was time for Roger’s team to step it up.
“That test at Homestead . . .” groans Power. “I was really sick and had a fever, but I think I’d have struggled anyway. I’d been a bit confident after that race at Chicagoland with KV Racing when I’d finished fifth. I thought, ‘Yeah! Penske’s going to be amazing, this is their specialty,’ but I couldn’t even go flat all the way around which, like I say, was standard IRL method on new tires and without running in other people’s aero turbulence. Ryan Briscoe had come along to the test, and at one point I said to him, ‘The car’s so nervous and on edge,’ and he said ‘I know, mate, and everyone assumes a Penske car is going to be faster than every other car by miles on an oval . . .’ But then he got in my car and he did go flat all the way around, so that didn’t look too good on me!
“At Homestead, he was sick,” says Cindric. “He couldn’t really function, wasn’t very fast, wasn’t consistent and he didn’t tell us he was sick. He just kept apologizing for not doing a good job.”
Power tried to remedy his issue with the car, but was again uncomfortable with being demanding. “I told Ron Ruzewski, who had been engineer for Helio [Castroneves] and was now temporarily mine, ‘Can we change the right-rear spring, soften it up?’ But obviously, I was the new guy in the team, so what weight did my opinion carry? Ryan and Helio had been coping just fine with the setup the way it was, and here’s this nobody who can’t even go flat on new tires and he’s asking for major changes! So I’m sure there were again people in the team who were wondering if Roger and Tim had picked the right guy to fill in.
“But then we tested at Barber Motorsports Park [a beautiful, undulating 2.38-mile permanent road course near Birmingham, Alabama] and I got fastest lap of the test by a good margin, and I was four-tenths of a second quicker than Briscoe. That sort of settled me in. I think the mood in the team shifted a bit and they thought, okay, he’s all right, and afterward, Roger called me and said, ‘Good job at the test.’ That was a cool moment.”
Power chuckles as he recalls how he and Ruzewski came as a culture shock to each other. “Our work methods were so different. At KV or Team Australia, I’d come into the pits and Dave Faustino would be saying, ‘You were a tenth [of a second] off in this sector compared with the previous lap, your teammate’s faster in this corner than you, and so on.’ At Barber, I’d come into the pits and Ron would say ‘Okay, here’s your data,’ and I’d be checking it out myself, while he went off to work on the car. To be fair to Ron, the Indy Racing League schedule had been flat-out ovals for most of the time, so that was his primary job – to engineer a car to be quick whoever was driving it, and he was great at that. But road and street courses are about refining the car to be basically quick but also suit the style of the guy in the cockpit, so I think we’d have needed to adapt to each other a bit.”
Just a couple of weeks before the first race of the season at St Petersburg, it became clear that Castroneves was still embroiled in his court case and that Power would have to fill in for him in the Marlboro-colored (though not officially Marlboro-sponsored) No. 3 car that Helio had made famous with Indy 500 wins in 2001 and 2002 and runner-up in the championship in 2002 and 2008. This was the big moment . . . and to the outside world, Power’s Penske debut was good but not as spectacular as his supporters perhaps expected. Will was aware of this, and also aware that his crew was still missing the No. 3 car’s regular occupant.
“As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of support for Helio within the team and Will had to overcome that,” says Cindric. “The guys even brought Helio’s helmet out and put it on the back wing of the car on the grid before the race to show our support. I remember asking Will beforehand, ‘Do you mind us doing this?’ and his response impressed me. He was very kind. He said, ‘No, that’s cool. I understand. If I was in Helio’s position, I’d like to see that.’”
It certainly wasn’t going to distract Power’s focus from his team debut.
“I came into the weekend feeling every single session counted . . . every single lap, really,” he recalls, “because I realized it could be my only chance before Helio was acquitted. And it kind of went okay, but tactically we wrong-footed ourselves in qualifying and I’m not sure why. Maybe Firestone changed their tire compound for that track that year, I don’t remember, but the team were bringing me in and giving me new tires after just one flying lap when what was needed was to stay out there and get some temperature in them: the second laps were faster. So we ended up sixth on the grid, a couple of places behind Ryan, and I know we could have started higher. But to be honest, I’m not sure that would have made any difference to the result on that Sunday. That sort of hinged on that horrible pit stop – 100 per cent driver error.
“I was saving good fuel behind Briscoe, and we were both being held up by whoever was in front of him, but then I passed Ryan on the lap that Tim had been planning to bring me in, so Tim decided to leave me out, and Briscoe pitted that lap instead. Well as luck would have it, there was a full-course yellow at that point, and so Briscoe cycled all the way to second as most people pitted, including me. Well then I missed my pit box, and went into Scott Dixon’s [
Ganassi] box! So I had to be dragged back and obviously that kind of thing takes forever compared with a normal stop, and with everyone bunched together, that meant I came out of the pits pretty much at the back of the field.
“Then I remember there was a crash in front of me which I missed, but I got some damage which toed out a rear wheel. It was everything I could do to stay in the position I was in all the way to the checkered flag, which was sixth. But I’m sure I just looked okay. Not bad, not good.”
“It was solid, and we saw it as a success,” says Cindric, springing to Power’s defense, but Will was aware he hadn’t made himself a ‘must-have’ from the Penske perspective, especially in light of the fact that Briscoe had gone on to win the race. Just days later, though, Power received word that he’d get another chance with Penske, this time at Long Beach, only this time there was a twist: although Helio Castroneves wasn’t the designated driver for the No. 3 car, the verdict of his court case was due to arrive on the Friday. That presented a dilemma for Roger Penske and Tim Cindric, one that even now causes the team president to pause, and exhale heavily.
“That Long Beach situation was one of the tougher deals I’ve had to try and figure out,” says Cindric. “Honestly, things didn’t seem to be looking too good for Helio at that point in time, so it was a matter of deciding what to do. The easiest thing would have been to just go about our business that weekend with Will in the No. 3, and if the court verdict turned out well, we’d bring Helio back at the third race [Kansas]. If it turned out bad, then we had our answer. The thing was, the logistically easier scenarios didn’t seem right to us. Roger and I discussed it, and we thought, ‘If the jury decides in favor of Helio, how do we not run him at Long Beach and help him get all that behind him? But then how do we look at Will, in the middle of a race weekend, and say, ‘Thanks, goodbye!’? So we decided to take a third car to Long Beach to be crewed by our sports car team, but we didn’t talk about it with anyone. We told those guys to just go straight to the hotel and we parked the extra trailer carrying the extra car somewhere else so it wasn’t a distraction.
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 18
