The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  Crucially, Roger passed on these sentiments to his part-timer, and it was exactly the encouragement a patient needed to hear.

  Says Liz: “Back in the aftermath of Will’s Edmonton win, Roger and Tim had mentioned that they were trying to get Verizon on board, and maybe it would be a part-time IndyCar/part-time sportscar deal. Well after Will’s accident, Roger called me and said, ‘Tell Will not to worry, he definitely has a ride with us for next year. We’re trying for a full-time IndyCar season with Verizon as our sponsor. And then Lowell McAdam [chairman and CEO of Verizon] also emailed Will and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to have a ride, we want to back you.’

  “Later, Roger told me, ‘I’m going to send out my plane so when they’re ready to release him it will be there waiting – whatever you need’. Roger, [his wife] Kathy, Tim and the entire Penske organization were wonderful. So were Dennis and Robbie and [Dreyer & Reinbold’s head of engineering] Larry Curry. They’d call every day to check on me and Will and told me not to worry, take as much time as I need. There was also a flurry of people who came to visit Will and we won’t ever forget any of them for that, because support was what Will needed – actually, if I’m honest, what both of us needed! The racing community and fans really rallied.

  “But the one who stood out the most was Vítor Meira. He came to visit Will when he was still in ICU, just after we’d found out how serious his injuries were, and I think for both Will and myself it was like a weight had lifted. Vítor had suffered the exact same injuries just three months prior at Indy and he marched in and said, ‘Will, you are going to be okay!’ and then he started to bend down and touch his toes. ‘See! I don’t wear my brace anymore and I can do that. I’m okay; you will be too.’ Then Vítor gave us his number and continually checked on Will thereafter and helped keep his spirits up. That meant more than he’ll ever know, because as well as being supportive and kind like the others, he could also relate from recent experience.”

  More distant injury experience (but Penske-related) was passed on by Rick Mears who, like Will, started out at Roger’s team as a part-timer and, also like Will, was massively reassured by The Captain during his long convalescence after pulping his feet and ankles against a barrier in 1984.

  “I don’t remember what Will and I specifically talked about after the accident,” says Mears, “but I do remember it being along the lines of what Roger told me after I smashed my feet: ‘Take your time, your seat’s safe, just focus on getting back to health.’ Thankfully, Will had already proven what he could do. It wasn’t as if this accident had come in his first or second race with Penske, so now it was up to Roger and the sponsor to see what they could come up with for 2010. I just told Will, ‘That bit’s out of your hands. You just focus on what you need to do, don’t try to hurry it, and do everything the doctors tell you.’”

  “And that’s what he did,” confirms Marg Power, who got the call from Kathy Cannon at the hospital – the first time Will’s mother and future mother-in-law had ever spoken – and made her first trip to the US in these unpleasant circumstances.

  “It’s a horrible feeling whenever he crashes but that one was devastating,” says Marg. “I let Kathy and Elizabeth know my flight details and arrived a couple of days later. Obviously, as an ex-nurse I felt I might be helpful, but I have to say Will was a very good patient anyway, which you might not have expected.”

  Recalls Liz: “After Dr Trammell saw the X-rays, he said surgery wasn’t needed but he wanted Will released into his care as soon as possible. But then the hospital wouldn’t let him go until they’d fitted him with this kind of body shell as a back brace and he’d learned to walk using a walker. I think five days after the accident Will had finally done and shown everything the doctors at Santa Rosa needed of him. Roger Penske very kindly sent his biggest plane for us because the seats could recline all the way back and Will wasn’t allowed or even able to sit upright for more than ten minutes because of the pressure on his spine.

  “That had been my first trip to America’s beautiful wine country, and I didn’t expect to leave with a broken driver, a portable toilet, a cane, and a walker. When Derrick Walker – no pun intended – collected us at the airport in one of his team’s big vans, his first comment on seeing Will, me, my mom, my brother, and Will’s mom was, ‘Well jeez, isn’t this a motley crew?!’”

  Over the next few weeks, Will Power lived up to his name, inching forward with his recuperation by every day walking a little further and a little longer. One of his engineers from his Walker Racing days, Brendon Cleave, would assist him, supporting Will on a leash. Undignified, yes, but the patient couldn’t afford to fall and hurt himself some more. Gradually, very gradually, he made progress.

  “He did everything the way his doctors asked him to do it, if you know what I mean,” says Marg. “He didn’t push too hard one day and exhaust himself. He would walk for exactly the amount of time the doctors prescribed. He was so determined to get back to how he’d been, and he knew that Dr Trammell knew best.”

  “I used to come home from work each lunchtime to shower him,” says Liz, “but when I went with Dreyer & Reinbold to Japan for the Motegi race, the washing duties came down to Mom and Marg . . .”

  “Gosh, that was a charade!” says Kathy. “But Marg is absolutely right: Will was a very good patient and, honestly, watching him get better was a revelation to me, it really was. My goodness, you talk about strong! Trust me, there will always be days when I want to strangle Will, but when he has to dig deep, he truly does and does it without complaining. There’s a real core of steel in him, and he developed a good rapport with Dr Trammell, who was always impressed with his progress.”

  Will remembers overdoing it just once. “First exercise I was able to do apart from walking was swimming. Then, three months after the accident, I went back to the gym full-time – I always used Jim Leo’s PitFit Training in Indianapolis. I thought I could just get back to what I’d been doing before, but I’d lost a lot of muscle and I was super-skinny. Before the accident, I was down to four-minute, forty-five-second miles on the treadmill, and I targeted that again on my first day back – pretty stupid, right? Just two minutes in, I was exhausted and had to stop. Three months earlier I was at the peak of my fitness but three months of not doing much meant I had to gradually build up. Fortunately there was a lot of time.”

  He wasn’t the only one taking advantage of that time. Marg stayed in Indianapolis for a full month and it became a team effort between Kathy, Marg and Liz to help Will convalesce. Over that time, the three ladies bonded . . . and conspired. Says Liz: “With Will flat on his back, we at last had a chance to de-junk and redecorate his apartment!”

  “I managed to go to the finale in Homestead in October in my back brace but the humidity combined with having that thing on was horrible,” says Power. “That’s when Cindric started calling me ‘Frank’ – short for Frankenstein – because of the way I was having to move and couldn’t bend. But two positive things happened that weekend. I don’t know this for sure, and he’s never told me, but I think Derrick said something that suggested other teams were courting me, or that I was looking around. And the second positive was that Tim asked me what I thought of Dave Faustino. I didn’t overreact and go too crazy because I didn’t want to give the impression that Dave was better than the Penske engineers. I just knew that we’d clicked and we’d had some success to prove it, so I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, he’s very good, he’d fit in well here.’

  “Then the following weekend I went to the NASCAR race in Charlotte, and they’d just signed Brad Keselowski for 2010 and Roger said to me, ‘You can stop looking around. We want you full-time in a third IndyCar next year.’ Verizon had come through.”

  On 19 November 2009 Power was confirmed as Team Penske’s third full-time IndyCar driver for 2010, driving the Verizon Wireless– sponsored No. 12 car.

  “To be able to compete for a full season with Penske Racing is really a dream come true for me,” read Power
’s quote on the Penske press release. “Working with the team this past season was the best experience of my career and I can’t wait to race for the IndyCar Series championship in 2010. I really have to thank everyone at Verizon Wireless and Penske Racing for this opportunity. I intend to make the most of it.”

  Many drivers sound that euphoric when their new ride is announced, when in fact their comments are as sincere as a politician’s pre-election pledge. But Will meant every word.

  “My career had been building to this point – that’s how I felt. It was perfect. I’d have the full range of Penske facilities, backup and personnel, and I knew Dave was joining too. So . . . this was it.”

  Chapter 16

  Becoming “The Man”

  Motorsport marketing folks tend to look at racing in a purely results-driven manner. While appearing rational, such logic makes sense only to those unaware of racing’s intricacies. One such person was Randy Bernard, who became the CEO of IndyCar in early 2010 after fifteen years in a similar position at Professional Bull Riders, Inc. By his own confession he was “drinking from the fire-hose” from the moment he got the IndyCar gig in order to learn everything about the sport and the internal politics within the organizing body, but he came into the job with a welcome fresh perspective and with an enthusiasm that should have been bottled and shared among his employees. To many, especially the majority of fans and media, Bernard quickly became regarded as A Good Thing for IndyCar. Here was a guy who dared to be different, dared to express an opinion and was willingly accountable for both good and bad decisions.

  Inevitably, though, his knowledge and understanding of racing itself could not keep pace with his eagerness to raise the IndyCar Series’ profile. At the fourth round of the season, in a catch-up conversation during practice for the 2010 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, Bernard waxed lyrical about the races he’d seen so far and was genuinely juiced on the adrenaline of IndyCar. However, his rookie naïvety surfaced when he expressed surprise and unease that the races he’d witnessed seemed to be lopsided in favor of one driver – not ideal for a marketing department trying to prove that the IndyCar Series was the most open in the world . . .

  “The only problem is this guy,” said Bernard nodding toward a TV monitor showing Will Power’s Verizon Team Penske No. 12 on a hot lap. “He could have this title wrapped up by August, couldn’t he? He’s almost unstoppable. Did you realize he was this good?”

  Well, yes, but . . .

  Looking back, it’s understandable that a newcomer to the IndyCar scene was caught on the back foot by the relentlessness of the Power delivery in those early stages of the 2010 season. Eight months earlier this guy had been flat on his back with spinal fractures, yet he’d won his comeback race at the start of the year, dominated the second round, and only missed out on a third straight victory through strategic error.

  But Randy was worrying over nothing: the sort of dominance shown by, say, AJ Foyt in 1964 when he won ten of thirteen Indy car rounds, was never going to happen again. Okay, an exceptional driver with an exceptional team was going to win races because reliability could be taken as read by 2010. Engineering firm Ilmor had made the 3.5-liter Honda V8 almost bullet-proof, and the old Dallara IR03s were trusty too, especially when prepared and maintained by top-quality squads such as Chip Ganassi Racing, Andretti Autosport and, in Power’s case, Team Penske.

  But a racing series where everyone has approximately the same equipment is never going to be a walkover for any driver, especially given the diversity of tracks on the IndyCar schedule – road courses, superspeedways, street courses and short ovals. Even though by the end of the Indy Racing League era winning races was largely confined to those aforementioned ‘Big Three’ teams, between them they ran nine drivers who’d visited Victory Lane in recent years. Expecting just one of them to dominate in those circumstances was unrealistic.

  What had helped push Power to the top in the early stages of 2010 was his obsession with racing, his work ethic, his detail-oriented mind, and his outright pace, which his rivals started to realize was unceasing. And now he was back with race engineer Dave Faustino, who matched Power’s attributes in all regards bar driving.

  “I think in 2008 and maybe even 2009, there were a lot of the old Indy Racing League drivers who hadn’t yet appreciated that the arrival of the Champ Car boys in the merger meant the game was up on road and street courses,” reflects Faustino. “The level of intensity increased a lot, so the amount of detail you had to study to find an edge just multiplied. Obviously in 2009, Will didn’t have a full season, and I was still at KV and working with a rookie, so our progress together was on hold. But once I joined Will at Penske for 2010, we basically picked up where we left off in 2008 – you know, going over data very meticulously and trying to think of everything. And I think that paid off and gave us that great start to the year.”

  It was exactly what Roger Penske had anticipated when he hired Faustino at the back end of 2009; far from a closed-shop environment, he wanted to see the Faustino/Power magic raise the team as a whole.

  “When we bring someone new on board our team we always welcome their input and feedback,” says Penske, “and we encourage them to be themselves, because that is what got them to that point in the first place. We knew that David and Will had a good working relationship in the past and we felt that we could take that experience to the next level with our team.”

  Team president, Tim Cindric, explains: “In 2009, the camps had been split up, so we had the two red-’n’-white Team Penske cars in one tent, and then had a separate tent and truck whenever we ran Will, so it was very much a two plus one environment, even to the extent of debriefs. He was definitely in ‘the third car’ and it was operated by personnel from the sportscar program. But in 2010, with the No. 12 becoming full-time, we put all three cars under the same tent and had all three drivers and all three race engineers in the same debrief room – a proper three-car team. And from what I recall, that integration was pain-free: all the engineers were easy guys to get along with; Helio [Castroneves] was appreciative of Will’s presence; and Ryan [Briscoe] was always an easy guy to get along with, too.”

  It was the sheer consistency with which the No. 12 appeared at the front of the pack at the start of 2010 that caught out much of Power’s opposition. He didn’t set pole for the season-opener at the new street course in Sao Paulo (“my mistake – used up the tires too much in the first two rounds of qualifying”) but on race day he was a factor from the drop of the green flag, and was undistracted by the race being interrupted by a torrential downpour that flooded the track. In the second half of the event he stalked his prey – Andretti Autosport’s Ryan Hunter-Reay and his own teammate, Ryan Briscoe – while also saving fuel.

  “It was a bit strange,” recalls Power, “because I’d been given a fuel mileage number I had to hit and I was on exactly the same strategy as Briscoe so I was surprised to see him pushing Hunter-Reay so hard. He definitely wasn’t saving fuel; he was trying to get into the lead, and I could see up ahead he was regularly locking up a front tire into one of the corners. I thought, ‘He could end up in the tire-wall there,’ and sure enough, that’s what happened. But he actually helped me a bit, because that caused the full-course caution that meant I could stop saving fuel: basically, I was good to go hard from the next green flag. And at that point, I turned the wick up big time: I went past Hunter-Reay into the lead and then I think I turned my fastest lap of the race one lap before the end, just to make sure I was out of reach.

  “The interesting thing is that my car that day wasn’t that special. It was a pretty basic setup we’d come up with because we didn’t know the track and all its intricacies. It was when we got back to the Penske race shop after that race that Dave and I really started going over the car and changing a lot of things like damper settings and so on. And so at St Petersburg we were really strong. I was P1 on old tires on the Friday, and just to see what we could do, we put on fresh tires at the end of the
afternoon session and I went seven-tenths [of a second] clear of the field. That was pretty awesome.”

  Not perhaps the way Castroneves and Briscoe would have described it – their faces resembled those of five-year-olds watching Bambi when his mother gets shot – and Power’s dominance continued for the remainder of the weekend. Barber Motorsports Park’s inaugural IndyCar race could have ended in similar fashion, such was Will’s advantage, but a strategy change during an early caution period proved costly on a track where it’s notoriously difficult to pass, so he came home fourth while Helio won. Then at Long Beach, Power led from pole but suffered a one-off gearbox glitch coming out of the track’s 35 mph hairpin onto the main straight, and that was enough to see him lose a couple of places.

  “The gearbox got stuck in first,” says Will, “and Hunter-Reay was right there and passed me, and I’d lost so much momentum that [Justin] Wilson also got through. I don’t think I’ve ever had that problem with a semi-automatic gearbox before or since but – and I know this sounds weird – I think of it like destiny took a hand or there was divine intervention. Ryan’s mother had just died of cancer and Long Beach had been their special race, the place where his mom had introduced him to Beccy, who became his wife. So I’m really glad he was the one ready to pounce when we had our issue and was able to dedicate the win to his mom. First time in my career I’ve been okay with losing a race I thought I could win.”

  If two wins had been only half of what might/should have been for Power in the opening four races, there’s no doubt he was proving worthy of his place at Team Penske.

  “Before the season, I think some people questioned why Will got that ride,” says Elizabeth, “or wondered why Roger Penske had set up a third full-time crew for him. So I think his form answered that. I was working with Dreyer & Reinbold at that time and I remember our drivers, Justin Wilson and Mike Conway, being amazed at the fact that Will was always the lead Penske driver.”