The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “Will is the most honest person I’ve ever met who isn’t a family member,” says Faustino. “I mean, the guy is just brutal on himself and, because of that, it makes me believe every single thing he says about the car and about his driving. His feedback is completely real, so that instills a complete trust. He’s not bullshitting me to protect his own ego, or saying the car’s crap when he’s made a mistake. And he trusts in me that I’m doing my best for him at all times. He understands I’m not going to get it right every single time, but also accepts that it’s his responsibility to give me good feedback. So Will is very good at analyzing and describing how the changes we’ve made feel from the cockpit. He sometimes takes a while to do it, because when he steps out of the car, it’s 50/50 as to whether he’ll give me his feedback on the car, or ask for my feedback on how he could have driven better. But that’s just him trying to improve himself, as usual.”

  As mentioned in earlier chapters, the merger of Champ Car and the Indy Racing League not only raised the standard of talent at the top of US open-wheel racing as a whole, it forced both series’ incumbents – drivers and engineers – to plunge deeper into data and examine every aspect of the car in meticulous detail. In their respective fields of driving and engineering, Power and Faustino are probably IndyCar’s poster children in terms of demonstrating what it takes to find success in the current era, and Dave believes it’s because of their backgrounds.

  “When we first started working together, we were very much learning together, too,” he says, “because I was only a year ahead of Will in Champ Car. Having been in Formula Atlantics with the Sierra Sierra team, I’d seen the driver coach David Empringham [former Atlantic champion] educating these young kids and that left a big mark on me. Teaching guys who were relatively new to the sport into looking into the details became part of what I did. Obviously, Will was already very much into that side of things, so immediately we had a good rapport, and would sort of bounce off each other’s enthusiasm. I taught him things about the car, particularly how to use the tools in the cockpit to adjust the handling, and he taught me what he’d learned from other series. Remember, he’d already driven a lot of different racecars, so he had some really good perspective and ideas that another driver with a more regular route to US open-wheel wouldn’t have done.

  “The detail work is just something we had to do because we’ve grown up in the spec-racing era. Everyone basically starts off with the same equipment and so it’s the details that could make the difference between a great car and a mediocre one.”

  Rick Mears has enjoyed watching Power digging through data and working with Faustino, recognizing many character traits he himself possessed when he won three IndyCar titles and four Indy 500s.

  “There are differences in that, for a lot of my career, my primary data suppliers were my ass and my hands!” Mears chuckles. “I was trying to translate what I was feeling on the track to my engineers. These days, the data is already there, but what the driver is feeling from the car is still an important part because he’s got to relate it to what the data’s telling him.

  “I’d say what’s really helped Will is that he has a good basic engineer’s understanding of how all the elements of a racecar work together, and analyzing what effect changing A will have on B, C, and D. I’d guess a lot of that is because he came from the old school, building his own car, thinking about what he’s doing to each corner of it and how it affects the other three corners. I’m sure he’s found that learning those basics has related to other things he’s learned further down the road and he just keeps building on them and evolving.”

  Fortunately, this mechanical understanding doesn’t cause Will to meddle or check up on his crew. “One thing I’ve always appreciated about Will is that he’s a lot more independent and professional than most drivers, and he expects us to be the same,” says Matt Jonsson. “We’re not there as his emotional crutch. He does his job, we do ours and he trusts us like we trust him. He’s not there checking it over or reminding us what’s right or wrong. I think he sees all of us as being on the same level as him but each with different areas of expertise. He’s the driver, Dave’s the engineer, I’m the crew chief and so on. I won’t tell him how to drive, he won’t tell me how to change dampers. That is exactly how I like to work – no one is second guessing someone else.”

  Will Power has evolved outside of the cockpit and engineering room, too, as he’s dealt with all the responsibilities of being a Team Penske driver. Driving with consummate skill must be backed up with an ability to meet and greet CEOs, entertain an audience of sponsors, host media dinners and become fan-friendly. Elizabeth says: “Will’s still shy at speaking in front of a big group of people – he’s not one of those people who revels in attention – but when he gets past the nerves and starts speaking, he’s fine. Compared with the very first time I had to work with him to now, it’s night and day. I think he’s naturally gotten better at dealing with everything that comes with being successful, and I’d give a lot of credit to Helio [Castroneves].

  “If they’re doing an appearance or presentation together, Will knows that if Helio does all the talking, then by comparison, he’s going to just come across as the shy one. So Helio’s natural warmth and openness has worked on Will and forced him to up his game. Now the pair of them play off each other really well and they make a really funny double-act. They’re each comfortable in their own skin, they’re comfortable with each other and there’s a really good dynamic which, from what Will tells me and I’ve observed, is the same when they’re working.”

  Helio agrees on all counts. “When Will first joined Team Penske, I was immediately impressed with his speed, and his technique is still something that surprises me, especially on road courses. After a while, I realized he was someone I could learn so much from, same as I did from other champions I’ve been teammates with, like Gil de Ferran and Sam Hornish. The best drivers always have something unique that you can learn from, and Will is one of those. He’s a real talent and he works so hard to make himself better.

  “Because he’s so good, obviously that makes it tough because he has the same equipment and he’s your most obvious performance comparison – which is why it feels so nice if I beat him. I think, ‘Wow, yeah, that was a good day!’ But even though he’s tough to beat, I am so glad Will’s with Team Penske because he raises the whole team level: I don’t want him taking his knowledge and feedback to a team we’re fighting with! He’s a quick learner, he’s become mentally stronger year by year and the way he improved on ovals in 2013 and 2014 really impressed me. He just looked so comfortable. So now he has the all-round game and, to be honest, that’s why he’s the champion: he put it all together. So, as a competitor, he will always be a threat, but that means also I can still learn from him.

  “As a person . . . Hmm, well, I used to think he was very quiet and shy, and often when he said something joking, I wouldn’t know he was joking, and I’d just think, ‘Man, this guy’s strange.’ But now sometimes, he’ll say something strange and I’ll think, ‘Oh ha-ha, he’s joking,’ and then I realize, no, this time he’s just being strange. But that’s Will. And as we’ve spent more and more time together over the years, I’ve understood him more, and I like having him on the team as a driver and competitor and also as a person and friend.”

  Rick Mears says: “I believe that, by winning the championship, Will may have opened the floodgates. Those three near misses had become such a big burden to him. When he won it, my first thought was, ‘Great, now he can go race!’ and that approach works for him. Look what happened near the end of 2013 when he was no longer in the championship hunt and was just driving in his natural way. He found it hard not to win races!”

  “That’s because Willy Boy is just a good, hard, balls-to-the-wall racer,” observes his former team owner Derrick Walker, now President of competition at IndyCar. “I got to see that first-hand as his boss, and it was fun and interesting. Obviously he’s moved on, and we have a di
fferent relationship now. I’m sure that, with part of my job being in Race Control, he sees me as ‘the enemy’ on occasion, and we’ve certainly had our arguments – Pocono [2014] is a recent example. But on that occasion I told him to shut up and take responsibility for his actions, not blame us for doing our jobs whenever one of his demons shows its head, and I think he came to accept we were right.

  “Will’s quite complex as a person – his mind is always spinning and there’s a lot going on behind that stare. You sometimes have to really dig for information from him, and you wonder what he’s holding back. Then other times he throws it all at you, totally unfiltered, and you think, ‘Well, jeez, where did that come from?’ But I have a lot of time for his opinions because he’s a smart lad who’s not afraid to work himself into the ground, and the people around him at Penske are the sort who appreciate that. So, yeah, quite a complicated guy out of the cockpit, but in the car, very uncomplicated: all he wants to do is win and show the world what he’s made of.”

  Power did what he could to repeat in 2015 but, far too often, ambition was thwarted by some of the most preposterous luck he’d encountered. In fact, at times that was a theme for Team Penske as a whole. With Chevrolet and Honda producing aero body kits for the season in order to increase brand identity and bring technical innovation back to the sport, Roger’s team was clearly the one to first get their heads around the new demands. Yet, somehow, the team’s season ended with just three wins out of eighteen races and only two of its drivers ever seeing Victory Lane.

  Power’s six pole positions – more than any rival, as usual – and three other front-row starts (discounting the two grids set by championship points, where again he was on the front row) just didn’t translate, for a wild variety of reasons. He ended the year with just one win – a comprehensive routing of his rivals at the Grand Prix of Indianapolis. As is so often the case, there woulda/coulda/shoulda been several more races like that. At St Petersburg, the season opener, teammate Juan Pablo Montoya jumped ahead of him during the final pit-stop sequence. Will made a brave stab at passing his teammate, yet eventually chose caution over valor after losing part of a wing endplate during the attempted maneuver. Elsewhere, the inaugural Grand Prix of Louisiana was jumbled by strategy, as was the first of the Detroit races, Toronto, Mid-Ohio and the finale at Sonoma.

  Detroit 2 was simply unfortunate. Despite having a gearbox issue that meant he needed a long pit stop to have it reprogrammed, Will should have won but was instead shoved into the wall inadvertently by a rival. This happened again in Milwaukee, albeit the car that tagged him was spinning at the time. At Fontana, Power’s collision with a squirmy Takuma Sato ended a race in which there were worrying signs that IndyCar had allowed four-wide pack racing again by making it too easy to be flat out all around the track. Pointing this out publicly attracted the ire of the series management and criticism by fans, who implied that if this road course racer wasn’t man enough for ovals, he should quit. That particular view conveniently ignored the fact that Will had overridden his instinct for self-preservation to lead more laps of the race than anyone . . .

  It was just that kind of a year. At Long Beach, for example, Power was left down in eighteenth on the grid because a backmarker crashed and caused a yellow flag when Will was on his hot lap. Then on race day the car stalled as he came into pit lane.

  Power remains fallible. There were days in 2015 when he struggled – his race setups at both Texas Motor Speedway and Iowa were way off what they needed to be – but, generally, the theme was luck – or lack thereof. Whenever he had an advantage, it was stolen from him by untimely full-course cautions that buried him in the pack. Montoya beat him in a straight fight in the closing stages of the Indianapolis 500, but there were several who pointed out that Montoya shouldn’t have even been in position to go for it, having hit pit equipment in one of his previous stops. In previous years, as had happened with Power, this would have incurred a drive-through penalty; on this occasion, it resulted in a fine for JPM. These post-race penalties that did nothing to change the results were a regular bone of contention for drivers and fans throughout the season.

  “It seems like we should go off strategy even when we’re leading!” said an only half-joking Power after the season finale at Sonoma, in which Montoya clipped the back of Will’s car, thereby ruining his own title chances and handing the 2015 championship to Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon. For Power, lap record-breaking polesitter, the day had already been ruined after dominating the first third of the race.

  “There has to be a way for the series to not punish the guys who are doing everything right. They need to stop closing the pits when there’s a full-course caution. If you’ve saved your fuel and tires and go a lap or two longer than your rivals, but then the pits are closed if there’s a yellow around that time, then those who weren’t as good are allowed to catch back up to you before you can pit. So you can go in the leader and emerge twelfth or whatever. Is this a sport or just a show?”

  He was bitter, yes, but then the end of the season left a rancid taste for everyone in IndyCar. One of his most respected rivals, Justin Wilson, died as a result of a 160-mph collision with debris during the race at the Pocono tri-oval, seven days earlier. To say the death of the gentle giant – Wilson was unusual for an open-wheel driver in that he was 6 foot, 4 inches – rocked the IndyCar community is putting it mildly. People were heartbroken by his loss, unable to speak about it without choking up. The man with the semi-ironic nickname of “Badass” – awesome in the cockpit, a true gentleman outside the car – was king of the underdogs.

  Power once remarked, “I tell you, Wilson is the guy you do not want to see in your mirrors. You know he’s not going to let you rest and if you make a mistake, he’s gonna be all over you. But I suppose, from another point of view, he’s good to have there because he’s fair and he knows what he’s doing; he’s not going to pull a wanker move and take you both out. Isn’t it stupid that guy’s never had a top ride?”

  The tragic irony was that Wilson had just found that quality seat at Andretti Autosport as a part-timer in 2015 and was rumored to be going full-time in 2016. But as much as Will respected Wilson’s top-rank talent and his ability to put underfunded cars among the Penske and Ganassi cars, he rated him on a personal level, too. “Justin was just a great, stand-up guy, top quality,” shrugged Will morosely. “Damn. Even now, it seems weird to be talking of him in the past tense. He was one of a kind.”

  The Wilson tragedy certainly put Power’s own disappointment into perspective after finishing third in the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series championship, but racing drivers are part of a special breed. Will’s determination to race and race hard wasn’t shaken, as shown by that stunning sixth pole of the year at Sonoma. He wants to reclaim the IndyCar crown in 2016, just as he wanted to retain it twelve months earlier.

  So the question that Will finds so fascinating and which can only be answered properly by time and results – what’s next? Well, the first Australian to win an Indy car title desperately wants to be the first Australian to have his face carved on the Borg-Warner Trophy for winning the Indianapolis 500, and he came achingly close in 2015. As for the championships, he now knows he can do it rather than just believes it, and that should be key to his continued competitiveness.

  “During 2014, I kept thinking, ‘Just one championship would be fine, something you’ve got for all time,’” says Power. “But it’s not enough. I want to win the Indy 500, and I want to win the championship again . . . and I want to keep doing that, keep going for it.”

  To his fans, that’s a promise. To his rivals, it’s a warning. For Will Power himself, it’s a mission statement, and one that he’ll hold for as long as he races.

  Glossary

  Anti-roll bar or sway bar: A bar that stiffens the lateral movement of the car by connecting lever arms from left and right wheels through a torsion spring, to help resist body roll or “lean” in fast turns.

  Downforce: Aero
dynamic downforce on a racecar is created by the wings and bodywork shapes. As the air passes over them at high speed, they push the car down onto the track. Downforce is also created by the shaped underside of the car, which sucks the car toward the track and this force increases the closer a car can run to the track surface. However, the upperside aerodynamic devices also create drag.

  Drag: The enemy of straightline speed. Thus on ovals, where speeds remain consistently high and the banking of the track creates its own centrifugal grip, overbody downforce is kept to a minimum, and the emphasis is on underbody downforce. Such is the importance of minimizing drag on a high-speed oval that often a car is set up to be naturally trying to turn into the corner without any steering input, so as to minimize the degree to which the wheels must turn against the natural airflow. This also means the driver has to “hold the car up” on the straights and fight its natural tendencies to turn left. Some drivers choose to set their steering-wheels accordingly, so appear to be turning gently right when in fact they’re traveling in a straight line.

  Green: A driver’s typical complaint at the start of the first practice session of the weekend, when there is too much fine surface dust and not enough rubber on the track because not enough cars have been out there yet.

  Marbles: As tires start to degrade through a stint, the asphalt scrapes off the surface of the tire under lateral load and these scrapings form balls of rubber marbles on the track, off the racing line. Should a driver go off-line, through a mistake or while trying to make a pass or allow another car past, these marbles will stick to the car’s hot tires. This is called “tire pick-up” and the resultant loss of grip is severe enough that it may take a driver a full lap to clean his tire surfaces and get back up to speed.