While his rivals’ respect for Power blossomed, his popularity among them was still very much at the seedling stage. He didn’t open up to his rivals and showed little interest in befriending them, something Jimmy Vasser had noted before, and which Liz readily acknowledges.
“Yeah, Will was trying so hard to be the ultimate Penske professional and prove himself both in and out of the car,” she says. “He’s a tunnel-vision guy anyway, but that year he wouldn’t distract himself at all. He was determined to earn a long-term contract with his dream team. So I think to anyone who didn’t see Will outside of the working environment, he came across as an asshole because being so closed off can come across as arrogant. He’s never needed to feel loved by his rivals, so he didn’t seek popularity and therefore didn’t really get it.”
If rivals were seeking some hole in his armor they found it at the next race, at Kansas Speedway, a 1.5-mile banked oval. As usual, Power had no excuses for a desultory twelfth place finish – “I drove like a wanker” was his succinct explanation at the time – and even now he nods earnestly as he says: “I was much too cautious because I genuinely felt out of my depth. It had been a while since my last oval race and I hadn’t raced at Kansas the year before.” And this same softly-softly approach would hurt him at the 0.875-mile Iowa Speedway seven weeks later, despite taking his first oval pole position. There he finished fifth.
“In qualifying on ovals, Will would be right near the front in 2010 and 2011,” recalls Rick Mears, “but when the green flag dropped, he’d often go backwards and that was down to a lack of confidence. But to my mind, he still handled things in the right way: he drove within his personal limits and brought the car home. The worst thing he could have done would be to push on without confidence or awareness of the car’s limits because that would have led to crashes. It takes experience to find the limit and that’s what he was working toward.”
As ovals go, Indianapolis Motor Speedway still seemed to be the one that came most naturally to Power, as it was the one that required the most talent. Second on the grid between polesitter Castroneves and Dario Franchitti that year, Will briefly took the lead in the first stint and was right behind Franchitti at the first round of pit stops. But Power was sent out with the fuel hose still in the car, incurring a drive-through penalty. In what he still recalls as being “the best car I’ve ever had at Indy,” Power had worked his way back up to fourth when there was another pitstop mishap, this time, a loose front wheel, necessitating another extra stop. In the circumstances, it’s remarkable he finished eighth, but inevitably his “500” stank of opportunity missed.
As did the race at Texas Motor Speedway. Briscoe and Power ran away from the field, but when Simona De Silvestro hit the wall, Penske No. 12 ran over the HVM car’s broken suspension arm, damaging its underbody and sending it for a long pit stop for repairs. Ryan dominated the remainder of the race, while Will trailed home fourteenth, disconsolate that Fate had tripped him up once more. However, wins at Watkins Glen and Toronto extended his championship lead, and second places at Edmonton and Mid-Ohio were reasonably satisfying, even though each of those came with drama attached.
“Oh God, Edmonton . . .” groans Will, and his reaction is understandable as he recalls a day when none of the main protagonists in the mini-drama emerged smelling of roses. The TV commentators didn’t understand the evidence of their eyes, many media writers proved they were ignorant of the regulations, the woeful rule that caused the problem gave the impression that IndyCar was a series for weekend track-day amateurs, Castroneves performed a one-man histrionic show in the infield, and Power broke with Penske protocol by declaring on TV that his teammate blocked him. It was a sorry mess.
While the rule against blocking in IndyCar these days is reasonably clear-cut – the driver ahead cannot alter his line in reaction to a move from his pursuer – back in 2010 it went much further. IndyCar insisted that a driver could not even take an anticipatory defensive line into a corner, but must instead take his regular racing line, regardless of whether that left the door open on the inside for the guy behind to make an easy pass. On Lap 77 of Edmonton’s airport course, after getting wrong-footed by a backmarker, polesitter Power lost enough momentum to allow Castroneves to close up. But Will abided by the rules, swung out wide to take the racing line and thus rolled out a welcome mat for Helio to drive up the inside and grab the lead. Another late restart with three laps to go gave Will the perfect opportunity to retaliate, but Helio chose not to follow his teammate’s example, and instead held a defensive inside line into the corner. Power, realizing he’d been duped, tried to go around the outside instead, but ran out of grip on the rubber marbles, which allowed Dixon through into second . . . which became first when the call came from Race Control that Castroneves now needed to serve a drive-through penalty for blocking.
A furious Castroneves refused to comply, and so was put to the back of the lead lap (tenth place), and Dixon hung on as winner ahead of Power and Franchitti. Castroneves erupted from his car and stormed off to argue with any IndyCar official he could find, while “experts” and fans confused themselves by thinking he had been penalized for deliberately running wide on the exit of Turn 1 to force Power to back off.
“My biggest mistake was switching to try to pass Helio on the outside,” says Will. “If I’d have just stayed behind him, he’d have got the black flag anyway for what was called blocking back then, and I’d have won. Afterward, on TV, I thought that it was so obvious what had happened, I said ‘Yeah, he blocked me.’ But I got in trouble with the team for that.”
Yet even the two Ganassi drivers stuck up for Power by defending race director Brian Barnhart’s decision to abide by the letter of the law and punish Castroneves. “Brian definitely made the right call there,” said Franchitti. “It’s tough for Helio . . . but you can’t be doing that.”
At the following race on the Mid-Ohio road course, it was Franchitti who kept Power off the top step of the podium, but legitimately. The pair pitted together, Power ahead, but the Ganassi No. 10 crew was marginally quicker than the Penske No. 12 crew at getting the car refueled and onto new tires, and Franchitti emerged in front. Power hassled his title rival to the checkered flag, but Franchitti was faultless in defense and crossed the finish line with a half-second advantage.
Yet the main drama for Power that weekend had been a crash in Saturday morning practice, when a cone that had been added to a curb at Turn 1 as a reference point was knocked down by another car. Distracted by its absence and on the limit of adhesion, Power nudged the inside curb, which pushed him wide across the track and onto the grass, demolishing the rear of his car against a tire barrier. Uninjured though he was, Power was mortified by the error.
“I was wandering through the paddock to check if Will was fit and not too bruised up,” remembers his former team owner Derrick Walker. “He was sitting under the Penske awning and seemed physically fine but he was mentally kicking himself around, and had a look on his face I hadn’t seen all year. He couldn’t believe he’d made a silly error and he was embarrassed watching his crew guys rushing to put his engine into the backup car in time for qualifying. So I said to him something like, ‘Look, these things happen. You’re not known as a crasher, that’s not your reputation, so move on. These are the times when a champion shows what he’s made of. So are you going to let it get on top of you and ruin your weekend?’ Well I don’t know how much difference that chat made but anyway, he then went and got the job done and took pole. I thought, ‘Atta boy.’”
That pole position, driving a backup car using Briscoe’s set-up, was one of Power’s pure inspirational moments, and there would be another two weeks later at the track that owed him most – Sonoma. Except this wasn’t so much a moment of inspiration as a whole weekend of sheer excellence. First thing he had to do, though, was make sure there were no after-effects from his back-breaking crash there twelve months previously.
“Oh, I had flashbacks,” nods Will slowly, his e
yes widening at the recollection. “The shunt in 2009 has left a mark on me for life because I’ve never been comfortable over that crest ever since. It’s not fear; you’re going too fast through there so the feeling doesn’t last long enough to be fear. It’s more experience and instinct that tries to remind you what happened before and make you less committed. So I had to block that out during qualifying. You can’t be uncommitted on a qualifying run.”
In fact, his qualifying runs were messy that weekend, a couple of tenths of seconds being lost to mistakes, which meant he only just scraped his eighth pole position of the season ahead of Castroneves. But Power’s hard work preparing for the actual race truly paid off and truly impressed Faustino.
“That was one of his best wins, in my opinion, and maybe not for the reasons everyone thinks,” says Faustino. “It was about Will’s very technically minded approach to the weekend. We knew the tires were going to go off quicker than the fuel ran out, and so he made decisions on how he wanted to set up the car and how he was going to drive it to make sure the tires lasted for as long as possible. He already had it in his mind how he was going to do that and he executed perfectly.”
Indeed. While his rivals saw their lap times fall off a cliff-face between halfway and two-thirds of the way through a stint, Power’s times increased at the normal rate of rubber degradation, his final laps of a stint just 1.5 seconds slower than at the start. Thus his margin over his rivals rose exponentially.
“It’s Will’s attitude that I love,” says Faustino. “It’s ‘Here’s the situation, how can we help the situation?’ It wasn’t just his talent at saving tires that won him that race. It was the conscious decision to do something about it, and that’s really rewarding for an engineer to see, because it means your guy is on the same page as you. That approach comes from the same bucket as his self-honesty. He’ll say to himself, ‘That guy’s quicker than me in this corner, okay, I’m going to do that.’ That’s the amazing Will Power, as far as I’m concerned. He’ll never say to me, ‘That guy’s quicker than me through that turn, his car must be better than mine, so make my car as good as his.’ He always looks within, says, ‘Hmmm, how’s that driver doing that? I must have room for improvement.’”
That victory clinched for Power the Mario Andretti Road Course championship within a championship. Now there were four rounds to go in the 2010 IndyCar season, and Power had a 59-point lead in the overall table. Those remaining events were all on ovals, at that point the weakest part of Power’s game, but how could he lose? Even if he got beaten by his nearest title rival Franchitti in all of them, Will only needed to keep him in sight, finish a couple of places behind him, and the title was his.
And yet . . .
Who’d have thought that, leading and coming into what should have been his final pit stop at Chicagoland, Power’s crew would fail to put enough fuel in, so he had to make a repeat visit that dropped him to sixteenth, while Franchitti got to the front by not taking tires during his stop, instead opting just for a splash of fuel? That result alone slashed Power’s lead from 59 to 23.
Who’d have thought that fifth place at Kentucky for Franchitti would be enough to put him three places ahead of Power? Or that finishing third at Twin Ring Motegi, Japan, wouldn’t be enough for Power to beat Franchitti on a weekend when Penske qualified 1-2-3 but finished 1-3-4?
But the real kicker was the finale at Homestead. Who’d have thought Ganassi could find a significant step in performance in the four days between the open test there and race weekend? On the Monday, Chip’s team had been behind Roger’s squad, but in qualifying and on race night, the red cars had a significant advantage. In an era when every team had almost reached the end of development potential with these seven-year-old cars, such progress in such a short amount of time was unheard of.
And yet all those things came to pass, and in a desperate attempt to overcome the inferiority of his car that night at Homestead – always an impossibility on an oval – Power slid up into the wall, terminally damaging his suspension and his title hopes. Franchitti became IndyCar champion for the third time in four years.
“I’m not sure I was in the right mindset for that race,” Will admits thoughtfully, “because I’d decided that if I’m not in position to win the championship by the halfway point of the race, I’m going to start taking big risks. That probably wasn’t smart: you need to make sure you finish because you never know how it might play out. Dario only finished eighth that race and if I’d just hung around to the end, I might have been close enough to him to clinch the title. But . . . the other way of looking at it is that he probably had something in reserve, he probably didn’t have to be only eighth. Anyway, I’d been taking Turns 3 and 4 really high up and I was just lining up to go around Hunter-Reay, got into the dirty stuff at the top of the track and I was just a passenger at that point and scraped the wall.”
Even so, Liz looks back at Chicago as the one that cost him most. She says: “Will wasn’t a fan of pack racing at all, because the talent/danger balance was so off. And I remember going into the race at Chicagoland he said, ‘I hope I don’t die tonight.’ I said, ‘Will Power! Why would you say that? If you think like that, be honest and say you don’t want to do it. But if you’re going to race, block out those thoughts and have fun. Those are your only two options.’ And in the race he was doing so well. All the guys who thought he wouldn’t be a threat on ovals suddenly saw he was. But I think that of the full-time crews among the front-running cars, Will’s was the newest to IndyCar, individually and as a group, so to me, that year’s title was lost to inexperience of the driver and the crew.”
Cindric appears to partly concur when he says: “That was Will’s first time running for the championship, and he wasn’t surrounded by a lot of people who’d had experience of that situation, so we could maybe have helped manage things better. It was a team loss, it wasn’t Will in particular. We’ve always looked at it as, ‘We win together, we lose together,’ and those last four races were ovals and were all about experience. So we put ourselves in a tough spot for Homestead and the Ganassi cars were just better there. Will didn’t really have the knowledge or confidence to change things around on the car.”
“That’s right,” says Power. “If we’d known then what we knew by the end of 2011, we’d have turned up to Homestead with a much better car. There was a lack of experience on my part – and Dave’s too, I’d say – for knowing what the car needed for an oval.”
Faustino looks at the season as a whole from the numbers perspective, and states: “Our principal problem was that we didn’t chalk up the results when we couldn’t win. If we’d had fourths and fifths on the bad days, like Dario was so good at doing, we’d have been champions. At that time, there were only five or six guys who could be expected to contend for wins every weekend, with the others just having their moments now and again. So with only a few guys collecting all the big points, if you dropped way, way down for whatever reason, then you were screwed, because at least four of the other five top guys would finish top-five.
“So Kansas . . . we didn’t have a good car there and Will drove cautiously to twelfth, but Texas (fourteenth) and Chicago (sixteenth) are what killed us and left us just desperately trying to cling on at Homestead. He’d led them both and if things had gone normally, bringing home an easy top-five finish in just one of them would have meant job done.”
Roger Penske sums it up thus: “After starting out the season with two wins in a row in 2010, it was pretty clear that Will was back at full strength and he and the Verizon team were going to be title contenders. We weren’t able to close out the championship but I think that was all part of the learning process that Will and the team went through. They kept improving in certain areas and they still had to learn what it takes to secure a title. It’s very tough in this sport.”
As Will was to discover again in 2011. After a year in which he’d scored five wins and eight poles but lost by five points to a champion with three wins
and two poles, he’d discover that ramping up his tally to six wins (and eight poles again) still wasn’t enough. There were some interesting similarities to the year before.
Again, Power won two of the first four races, and could feasibly have taken them all. At St Petersburg he lost the lead during a restart when Franchitti passed him around the outside of Turn 1, which gave him the inside line for Turn 2. On another restart, Simona De Silvestro ran into the back of the Penske car, which knocked off an aero flick, blocking the intake of the brake-cooling system, which caused the brake to lock up. That left Will unable to mount a challenge to Franchitti in the final stint. Second place would have to do.
At Barber Motorsports Park, however, Will led from pole position to checkered flag, while two races later the only driver who offered a serious threat to him in the rain of Sao Paulo was Takuma Sato, who was taken out of the equation by poor strategy from KV Racing.
In between those two wins, however, came Long Beach. Power and Andretti Autosport’s Ryan Hunter-Reay had been the pacesetters all weekend, but were running second and third (RHR ahead after a bold pass on Power following pit stops) behind another Penske car, that of Briscoe, who’d gotten lucky with how a full-course caution had fallen relative to his pit stop. But then the third Penske, that of Castroneves, entered the scene during a restart with eighteen laps to go. He was behind Power . . . and then he was into Power, spinning the pair of them around. Will dropped to fifteenth, and climbed to tenth in the final fifteen laps . . . but on a day when a definite podium and a possible win went missing, it was little consolation.
“Obviously I was pissed off – massively,” says Power, who had to be talked down off the ceiling by the ever-calm Mears. “I was furious. But Tim didn’t want to see or hear you talk bad about your teammates in public; he wanted us to sort it out in the team bus. And to be honest, what can you say? It’s not as if Helio did it deliberately. He was trying to defend his fourth place from Oriol Servià, maybe looking in his mirrors at the crucial moment when he should have started braking, and he locked up and slid into me.”
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 22
