The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “So that’s why I was in my dream scenario – saving fuel while also pulling a gap on the rest of the field. Anyway, just before the first pit stop, I got on the radio and said, ‘When do you want me to push?’ They started laughing, and I said: ‘I’m serious, when do you want me to start going quick?’ They said, ‘Mate, you’ve done enough . . .’ And that’s how it went until the end. It stayed green all the way – at last we had a race like a Formula 1 race, with no cautions until the last lap when someone crashed.”

  As Power crossed the line for his first win in almost eighteen months and his first win for Team Penske, Beresford yelled over the radio, “Not bad for a bunch of part-timers!” His excitement was heightened also by the fact that his and this crew’s full-time job, running a sportscar in the Grand-Am Rolex Series, was proving a bust after years of success in the American Le Mans Series running Porsche Spyders. Not since LMP2-class victory at Petit Le Mans the previous October had the team visited Victory Lane, so for several people within Team Penske, this result was a rare day of jubilation in 2009.

  Not that it had been completely plain sailing for Power. “I almost lost it at one point. I put half a rear wheel into the dirt on the exit of one corner, and I was on full opposite-lock catching it. I remember thinking to myself, ‘F#$%, that was lucky! Gotta stay smart.’ I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if I’d spun off while out in the lead all by myself. You know, I’d shown Roger my speed but he wanted to see if I knew how to win.”

  Unfortunately, The Captain wasn’t there to witness his new guy win because he was attending NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 that weekend, but after watching the replay of his yellow car lead 90 of the 95 laps, he surely loved seeing the post-race interviews.

  “Sitting and watching’s been real bad,” said Power on TV, “but as long as I’m part of this organization it’s great because every time I’m in the car, I know it’s a really good one.” And when he was asked, “Did you ever second guess yourself at stepping into a situation where there was nothing guaranteed [full-time]?” Power was answering almost before the question was over. “Nope. I hardly even looked at the contract when I signed it. I was very willing to help, and I told Penske that when I interviewed with them.”

  Added Cindric: “Will has been doing a great job. He came here and delivered for us every race. Hopefully we can put something together for him next year because he certainly deserves it.”

  And on it went.

  “That was one of the best feelings ever,” says Power. “I was so buzzed that, honestly, I could have gone out and done a whole other race. I had a chance to sleep in the next morning, and I woke up feeling so good. I was just lying there happy. I thought back to 2008 and what a horrible year it had been, and then worked out I’d gone eighteen months without a win. So at that point I was really enjoying life thinking how good everything’s going.”

  Kentucky, a 1.5-mile oval, was next on the agenda for the part-timers, but when rain canceled qualifying, the grid was set by points, which put Power down in twentieth on the starting grid. Erickson took a big swing at strategy, gambling on the return of rain, and that put Will in front for thirty laps before he was compelled to stop for more fuel. But the rain held off, the race played out in normal fashion, and the No. 12 car came home ninth. At least he’d put more oval laps on the board.

  And next was Sonoma.

  Chapter 15

  Agony, morphine and ecstasy

  “I was absolutely ready to go and do again what I did at Edmonton,” says Will Power reflecting on what was planned to be his seventh race for Team Penske, at Sonoma Raceway in 2009. “The team had tested there a week prior with two cars, and obviously the full-time drivers – one of them in the championship hunt – had to take priority so I missed out, but that was fine. I was determined. The year before with KV Racing I’d qualified third there, but Helio [Castroneves] and Ryan [Briscoe] had qualified and finished 1-2 so I guess Penske already had a pretty strong basic Sonoma setup. I was confident, and so motivated.”

  So too were his team. In conversation with RACER magazine that weekend, chief engineer Nigel Beresford and team strategist John Erickson – two sensible, straight-talking guys – were full of compliments for their driver.

  “Will works so hard and is so intense,” said Beresford, “and it’s difficult for him emotionally at the moment because he’s desperate to be in the car all the time and desperate to make a good impression on the team. Well, he’s doing that. We’ve explained to him what Roger and the team expect – put numbers on the board, keep the car in the race, don’t crash out – and he’s a smart guy and taken that in.

  “Will’s very interested in the technical side, works very well with Ryan and Helio, and it’s great when we’re on road and street courses to have that feeling, ‘That’s as fast as the car can go.’ He’s a dream to work with, really.”

  Added Erickson: “Will’s feedback is very detailed and typically correlates to what we see on the data, but we quickly noticed he’s got a lot of good input on strategy, too; he’s really thinking while he’s out there. He’s also sensible: on street or temporary circuits, he’s not risking the car to get that last tenth of a second if he thinks there’s an engineering way to make the car faster. Will’s smart enough to do just enough to be fastest, not throw it at the wall trying to get a bigger gap. He’s got the right mentality: he listens, he’s not trying to run the operation, he does what we ask, he does everything we need for the sponsors. Working with Will has been . . . well, there are no downsides. He’s a perfect fit for this organization.”

  Even Penske president, Tim Cindric, famous for keeping his cards close to his chest, admitted: “Our goal is to be able to offer Will something for next year, and our aim is to give him a full-time ride. If we can, we will.”

  Tim’s words would provide some solace for Power within twenty-four hours of them being uttered. His crash in Saturday morning practice at Sonoma could have ended his career and his life as he knew it.

  Turn 3 at Sonoma was and still is a tricky corner, not because of the skill necessary to master it but rather the blind faith a driver needs in order to commit on the exit of the turn. Cars come over a crest and plunge down to Turn 4, so for a crucial nanosecond, given how low a driver sits in a single-seater, a driver’s sight of the track ahead is temporarily obscured by the nose of his own car. Nelson Philippe, who hadn’t raced an Indy car for almost two years and hadn’t done a full season in three, spun his Conquest Racing car twice in eleven minutes at the start of the session. Problem was, second time around he held the brakes on and so the car didn’t roll off the racing line; instead, it sat precariously, two-thirds on the track, just beyond the blind crest.

  Next car through, EJ Viso’s HVM Racing machine, was only going at warm-up lap pace, and even he was unable to completely avoid the stationary machine, breaking his rear suspension on the nosecone of Philippe’s car. Power, already onto a hot lap, didn’t have a hope as the yellow lights and yellow flag warning of a hazard ahead were on the inside of the corner, well off the track and not within the drivers’ sightline. From the outside, the subsequent 120 mph collision looked like it might have hurt Philippe more than Power, as Will’s car had struck the cockpit area of the Conquest machine. But in fact, Nelson escaped with a fractured ankle. Luck had ignored the occupant of the Penske car, however, which had effectively bent in the middle, with the engine trying to fold in on the cockpit, pushing the driver’s back unnaturally forward.

  “I stayed conscious after the impact,” says Power, “and I can remember thinking, ‘$*&%, my back!’ My brakes now weren’t working, so as I was sliding toward another barrier, I was praying not to hit it while I was in such agony because that would make it worse. It was incredible pain, the worst I’d ever felt in my life. When the Safety Team arrived, they tried to shoot morphine up my nose but it did nothing. I was just begging, ‘Please, get me out of here and give me something for the pain.’”

  “I
was doing the PR for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing,” says Elizabeth, “and our pits were right next to Will’s that weekend. So there I was with my headphones on, listening to the radio commentary, and when the yellows came out, at first they said it was for Viso, but then I heard Will’s name and my heart sank. I had this horrible feeling. Then Davey Hamilton [driver-turned-radio-commentator] said, ‘Wow, this is really bad. I hope Will is okay.’

  “From where I stood, I couldn’t see a monitor, but my team’s reaction as they stared at their screens didn’t look good. I checked over on Will’s pit stand, and John [Erickson] and Nigel [Beresford] seemed just fine . . . but that was because their monitors had gone out. So when I heard on the radio that Will was being loaded onto a stretcher, I rushed to tell them and then all three of us raced over to the medical center. I remember being so, so scared and the tears running down my face . . .”

  Another person gut-punched by the sight of the rescue operation was Power’s previous race engineer, Dave Faustino, who’d remained at KV Racing in 2009.

  “When Will first got the ride at Penske the previous winter, we spoke quite a lot, but once the season started, we weren’t in a ‘talk every week’ situation at all. I was buried in work because KV had axed a lot of its staff and my priority had to be to get Moraes up to speed. Plus me and my wife Alison had our first child in 2007 so any time I had off, I was doing two-year-old-kid kinda things.

  “But when Will got hurt at Sonoma, I was like, ‘Shit, I need to talk to Will more,’ and I still feel bad that it took that incident to remind me how close we were. I was watching on the monitors as they lifted him out and put him on the stretcher, and I could see how serious it was so I just started choking up, to be quite honest. It was terrible. I’d still felt close to Will even though we were now in different teams, but that crash brought it home to me that it’s pretty important to stay in contact with your closest friends, and don’t let it go too long between talking to them.”

  Those semi-silences that fall over racetracks during red-flag periods are usually caused by the Safety Team needing to tow a spun car out of a gravel trap, but the stony faces staring at monitors during this rescue operation told their own story. Fellow driver Vítor Meira – at this point still recuperating from back injuries incurred in a huge shunt at Indy back in May – was sitting on the AJ Foyt Racing pit stand and winced in sympathy as he saw the state of Power’s car. “It’s his back,” he said, “100 per cent. It’s the same thing that happened to me. These cars bend in a big front-on crash. That looks bad.”

  It was.

  Power says: “They got me out, put me in the ambulance and then I started thinking, ‘Hang on, how’s the other guy?’ I suddenly got scared I might have killed him, because of where I’d hit his car. When we got to the medical center, I was still trying to find out, and they said, ‘Well you can ask him yourself, he’s the guy beside you.’ I looked across and saw Philippe lying on another gurney. I said, ‘Nelson, what the f#*% were you doing stopped in the middle of the track?’

  “Then, from the worst pain in my life, I had one injection and then nothing – no pain at all – which gives you some idea of the drug dosage they gave me. Awesome.”

  “When they finally let me see him at the medical center, it was the hardest thing in the world to stay strong for him,” says Liz, “because there was all this blood and I could see his fire suit had been cut away. Thankfully it turned out the blood was from him gashing his lip and knocking out part of a tooth, but obviously I was thinking the worst. I held his hand and he looked at me and said, ‘This medicine is the best!’ I had to chuckle at that. And then it was a flurry of activity and they said they were airlifting him to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. That’s when I really had to hold it together.

  “Denise Titus, the IndyCar nurse, flew with Will, and I should just say now what an angel she was then and still is to us. But when John and Tim came and put their arms around me and said it’s going to be okay as Will was wheeled off and put in the helicopter, that’s when I really lost it. Watching this person you love so much being airlifted to hospital and not really knowing how bad it was . . . that’s one of the worst feelings. I always knew it could happen – racing is dangerous – but you can never be prepared for the reality. And unfortunately, that whole experience has ruined me for every race now. Between green flag and checkered flag, I’m a nervous wreck, and my heart stops every time there’s a caution.

  “Anyway, I needed to get to the hospital urgently now, and I called my mom, hysterical. She’d been with my brothers, Matt and Billy, and they hadn’t gotten to the track yet. I said to her, ‘Will’s been in a bad accident; you need to get to the Memorial Hospital’ – and then I hung up . . . and they didn’t know which Memorial Hospital I was talking about! So I found out later from Mom that my brothers decided to stop at a McDonald’s close to the track; it was crowded, and so my brother stood on a chair and yelled, ‘Excuse me, can someone please tell me if there is a Memorial Hospital close to here?! This is an emergency.’ I’m soooo glad I wasn’t there for that embarrassment! But my family’s great; I’d be lost without them, and I knew they’d reach the hospital faster than I would.

  “My team owners, Dennis Reinbold and Robbie Buhl, were very kind and told me just to go, and they even found someone who’d take me. But in the end I went with Nelson Philippe’s girlfriend and someone who works at Sonoma Raceway.”

  As she’s mentioned previously, Kathy Cannon doesn’t like to regard herself as a substitute mother, but that’s exactly what she became right then.

  “After speaking to Liz, I was trying to get to the hospital as fast as I could,” she says, “because I was the emergency contact that Will had put on all his medical documents. So when I got there I had to answer all these questions for the paperwork, when all I wanted to do was see him. Finally they told me I could go in and, oh, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. He’s lying there flat on his back with a neck brace on, the nurses are standing by him, and I go in and ask, ‘Hi honey, how are you?’ And I tell you, it was so difficult to be strong when he said, ‘That’s it. It’s over. My career’s over. This is what I always dreaded.’

  “Will is not only very honest, he expects you to be totally honest with him, and so by reassuring him he was going to be okay I felt like I was betraying him. But honestly there was something inside of me that told me he’d get through this and I didn’t feel like I was lying. But I certainly didn’t know he’d recover. How could I?

  “Then one of the nurses asked me, ‘Are you his mother?’ and Will says, ‘No, but she needs to be my mother-in-law. I need to do that thing with Lizzy.’ And I remember thinking that was a strange thing for him to say right then. Sweet, but strange.’”

  Elizabeth herself stayed amazingly strong, in more ways than one. “The doctors at Santa Rosa told us Will had broken his second, third and fourth lumbar vertebrae and fractured his fifth thoracic vertebra and naturally they wanted to do emergency surgery on him, but I wouldn’t give permission for anything until Dr Terry Trammell [renowned racing injuries expert in Indianapolis] had examined him. Everyone at Santa Rosa Memorial and Dr Schmidt who was the track doctor and also worked at the hospital were wonderful, but they’re used to dealing with trauma patients, and for Will and his profession, Dr Trammell knew how to deal with this type of injury to get him back in the car.

  “Those first twenty-four hours, I think I just ran on adrenaline, but I remember once they moved Will to the ICU Trauma Unit, I was waiting to get more answers from the tests, it was about 10 pm, Will was finally asleep and I just broke down. I felt so lost. Will was convinced his career was over, and it was a matter of trying to reassure him, but not really knowing the reality myself. Denise was wonderful, but couldn’t stay with us the entire time, so my next few days were all about monitoring Will, communicating between the doctors at the hospital, Denise and Dr Trammell, and also Team Penske.

  “The hospital had Will so heavily medicated, and he doesn’t
even take Tylenol or Panadol for a headache, so I got in an argument with one of the nurses because I felt they were giving him too much and they needed to wean him off. Dr Schmidt helped sort that, too, but of course he had other patients and couldn’t be with Will 24/7.”

  “Liz is right: I hated being on all that medication,” remembers Power, “but at first I just couldn’t stand the pain of not being on it. I try not to think back to the sleep patterns and pain patterns at that time – too depressing, especially because I was doing nothing and had too much time to think. Even on the Saturday I crashed, I was lying there totally pissed off that I wouldn’t get to race the next day. Then after they told me the injury, I realized I also wouldn’t be able to do the final round at Homestead, which was supposed to be my next race. So I was just flat on my back, worrying about the future and whether I’d have a ride with Penske the next year.”

  Roger Penske tried to put those fears to rest.

  “The accident at Sonoma was tough, and I know Will had to work very hard to recover,” says The Captain, “but it honestly didn’t alter our plans within the team. We were working with Verizon on a third-car program for Will the following season and we continued down that path, regardless of what happened in Sonoma. We believed Will would come back strong and we were hopeful we could put something together for him in 2010.”