The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “I loved hearing about that,” says Bob, laughing. “Apparently when Bevan and Will were setting up in the paddock at Oran Park, one of the F3 regulars dropped by and said to Will, ‘Nice to meet you, always good to see a new face and have an extra car, but don’t be surprised if you qualify somewhere near the back. This field’s pretty competitive.’ So Will takes pole position and wins both races!”

  Carrick says: “As you can imagine, driving home that night with two trophies, I was thinking, ‘Maybe we should do a bit more of this . . .’ And so I left Will in for the whole season, and he got several more wins and finished second in the championship despite missing the first four races.”

  “I’m pretty certain that if I’d done all the rounds, I’d have won the title,” says Will, “and if I’d have had the car James Manderson [eventual champion] had, even despite missing those four rounds, I think I’d have won it. But to be totally honest, part of that is because the field wasn’t deep enough in talent and part of it is because I found that car so easy to drive compared with Formula Holden. I think what helped make up our deficit was that Bevan’s cars for me were just so well prepared. It was a small but real slick organization, absolutely first-class. And ever since, he’s been a great friend, a great supporter.”

  “It’s kind of Will to give credit to us,” says Carrick, “and he’s right in that Gary did a great job with our car. But I have no doubts Will was the main reason we looked so strong. Will was – still is – different from any other young drivers I’ve dealt with or seen in that his focus was just unbelievable. All his waking hours were spent thinking about the racecar, where other kids give you the impression that they think they can get by on just talent, and the fun side of it is as important as the work.

  “The other thing that set Will apart was his recall. I remember at Wakefield Park, as we were sitting back at the hotel and talking about what the car needed to improve it, he had this mental checklist ready because he could remember every little part of the track and what the car was doing at that point. Oh, and the other thing was, even if he was fastest, which he usually was, he wasn’t happy: he had to improve that car.”

  Bob Power notes proudly: “Will just seemed to attract people who I’d describe as real racers’ racers. They liked the way he drove, his attitude to always go for it, and they liked his attitude to work, and to constantly improve himself and the car. Both Bevan Carrick and Graham Watson fell into that category. Bevan’s ride was totally funded already, but he saw that he could have a lot of success with Will, and wanted to help him. And Graham was the same way in Formula Holden. Sure, he’d like to have been paid more, but his bigger priority was to be competitive, which is why he offered such a bargain on that car. And so Will ended up having that massive year – winning the Formula Holden championship, and finishing second in the Formula 3 championship even though he’d missed the first four races.”

  “If I could win only one championship in Australia, I’m sooo pleased it was Formula Holden,” says Will. “Not just because it was the top single-seater series in the country but because I was able to reward Graham Watson’s faith in me. He was a fantastic guy, and @#$%ing cancer got him in 2009. I was gutted because he was a legend for talent-spotting, and then once he’d helped you along – and you can ask any of the good drivers he worked with – he wouldn’t let you go. He was in your fan club for life, and he just kept on cheering for you. Top bloke.”

  Another ‘top bloke’ was Mark Larkham, who was as good as his word since his first encounter with Power the previous October, despite being aware that Will was only looking at V8 Supercars as a fallback in case the single-seater dream died.

  “At no point did I look at him as a future touring car driver, at all,” Larkham says, “and that’s nothing to do with Will’s talent or what he showed us in the Falcon. It was because his internal G-meter was set for open-wheelers. However, I was still thinking of him as a partner for the Queensland 500 and Bathurst 1000.

  “So in 2002, I took him out to Queensland Raceway to give him a test in our Ford Falcon. Now a touring car is a big jump from Formula Ford and totally alien – really heavy, high center of gravity, low downforce, not much tire – but the way Will went about learning it was remarkable. His demeanor didn’t change, he went about everything in a very methodical way and he didn’t rush himself. He was thinking so hard and learning so quick.

  “I probably went out and did a 1 minute 10 second benchmark time, and normally kids try to impress too hard too soon, thinking they can get down to a 1 minute 11 seconds in their first run. That’s never going to happen with these cars; they really are unique. So normally you’ll see these kids start at 1 minute 16, work down to 1 minute 14 and stall out. They run out of ideas about how to go quicker because they haven’t really been learning and adapting as they’ve gone. Then here comes Will and on successive runs his best lap times went 1 minute 16, 15, 14, 13, 12 . . . I can’t remember if he got into the 11s or not, but by then I’d already decided this was the guy I wanted to share the ride with at the endurance events.

  “The two previous years, I’d had Geoff Brabham and Wayne Gardner, and while I have enormous respect for their previous achievements, drivers at the back end of their careers are just hard work; they want things the way they want them, and if the car doesn’t behave in a way that suits them, they struggle. They can’t adapt. So Will was a breath of fresh air.

  “As a team, we were just coming out of a lean year, and it hurts to say this but in a forty-car field we were midfield at that time. [Sponsor] Orrcon had signed with us at the end of 2001, so 2002 was our first year with that funding and we’d been busy rebuilding. But in Queensland, we finished eleventh out of thirty-five cars, which was respectable in the circumstances, and eighteenth at Bathurst. I was pleased to be able to help get Will in the guest ride in the Gold Coast event a few years ago, too. I thought he did a great job that further showed his maturity.”

  Power’s early V8 Supercar experiece rang alarm bells for one man, however – his F3 team owner Bevan Carrick.

  “I told Will, ‘Mate, I hope that’s the last time I see you in one of those!’” says Carrick, “and that was because I was sick of seeing all these young guys heading off to tin-tops instead of single-seaters. In my opinion, it had been too long since we’d had an Australian at the top of the sport. I could remember sitting up in the middle of the night to watch Alan Jones in his great years with Williams, so to then have to wait twenty years before Mark Webber made it into Formula 1 was unbearable.

  “So over the course of the year, I started thinking about getting some of my contacts together and sending Will to an F3 test in England. I started to pressure him to get a passport, and I explained why and that really got his attention. And one of my contacts, an Indonesian guy called Maher Algadri who was a keen amateur racer like myself, decided he wanted a Dallara F301 with a Honda engine, and so two thoughts came together. We’d send Will to test at Silverstone in this car that Diamond Racing in the UK were selling and then have it shipped back to Australia. Then when we got it back, we’d prepare it for Will to race at the final Australian F3 round, supporting the CART Indy car race at Surfers Paradise. It was going to be interesting to see how he’d go, because now he’d finally be in up-to-date equipment, comparable to the rest of the F3 field.

  “Well, of course Will went and blitzed everyone . . .”

  In every way, then, Will Power had achieved as much as he could within the single-seater genre in Australia. He’d inherited the basic raw desire and driving talent of his old man, but he’d taken it several stages further . . . hopefully in a manner that would suit him in his career ahead.

  One man who had no doubts was Will’s Formula Ford mechanic, Trevor Owen.

  “Having run Bob and Will, I’d say that apart from the desire to race and race hard, there are way more differences than similarities between them,” says Trevor. “Whereas Bob could work on a car in terms of maintenance and then go out and wring a
car’s neck, Will was thinking about how to actually develop it and do that in a very methodical way . . . and then go out and wring the car’s neck. Bob would agree with me that Will was a lot more practical. It’s a generational difference, or because one was doing it for fun and driving by the seat of his pants, while the other was trying to improve and turn this into a career.”

  And now that career was going to take Will Power abroad.

  “He was incredibly keen to get out,” says Kerry Fenwick. “He didn’t have the money to go around doing Australian Formula 3 or Formula Holden again, plus what was the point? There wasn’t much more he could do and he knew he’d become a big fish in a little pond on the domestic scene. He and Gary had always watched British Formula 3 on TV and believed it was the most competitive junior series in the world, so Will felt he needed to gauge himself against the best young drivers. I don’t know if he realized how tough it would be, but he knew he had to go.”

  Says Bob: “I did a deal with a guy called Barry Locke to kind of watch over Will in the UK, and Hughie Absalom offered us a very cheap deal with Diamond Racing in British Formula 3. That was the same team who Will had tested Algadri’s Dallara for at the end of 2002. Problem was, they were switching to the Ralt chassis for 2003. Now, the word we were getting was that the Ralt might be better than the Dallara, and the rest of the world was wrong. Well, things like that don’t happen in racing. Everyone else had bought the quicker car . . .”

  Chapter 5

  Going international

  “The first time I saw Will Power drive was on a test day at Donington Park [UK], and I was standing at those downhill sweepers, the Craner Curves, and watching through the Old Hairpin. I remember thinking, ‘Blimey, this guy’s brave!’ At that early stage, you don’t know if it’s just brave or if he’s genuinely good, but I could tell he was absolutely ragging it. I remember thinking, ‘I’d like to see this guy in a Dallara to see what he’d make of it.’”

  These words are those of Marcus Simmons, a journalist for Britain’s famous weekly Autosport magazine, and one of the most fastidious students of junior open-wheel series over the past three decades. In 2003, he would cover the British Formula 3 Series, and his keen eye told him much of what Power was feeling in his new would-be hotrod: a Ralt F303 was no match for the equivalent Dallaras.

  Will left Australia for Europe that winter not without trepidation. He would soon come to miss his “family and friends, the food and the sunshine.” But not to the extent that it dented his desire to make it big in the UK and use that as a launch-pad to success in racing. Girlfriend, Kerry Fenwick, and best mate, Gary Hamilton, had made the trip with him, so that eased the transition, and there were unseen or rarely seen silent partners and fans without whom he couldn’t have made it. Over the next three years, he’d have several of these to thank, but in the early days of 2003 it was a combination of his dad, Bob Power, along with Tom Warwick from the Australian Motor Sport Foundation and businessman Maher Algadri, who were helping to keep the kid afloat. This added extra pressure and Will felt he was letting them down when his best result from the first four races with the Ralt was a seventeenth place.

  “I left Australia thinking I was good,” he says, “but I was way off. The competition was so much deeper in the UK, kind of how I’d expected it to be when Gary and I used to watch the British F3 races on TV, but at this point, I didn’t have the car to do the job. Or that’s what I thought and hoped, anyway, because we were at the back! I couldn’t tell if it was me or the Ralt that was off the pace, because I didn’t have the experience, didn’t have a teammate and had one-year-old engines. But I did suspect there was a good reason why everyone else had gone with Dallara! There wasn’t another Ralt in the field, so there was no one I could compare notes or data with.”

  “That iteration of Ralt had nothing to do with [legendary New Zealand marque founder] Ron Tauranac by that stage,” says Simmons. “It was a guy called Steve Ward who had the rights to the name. And, looking back, it’s impossible to tell whether the car was a dog of a design or whether Diamond Racing just didn’t have the resources to make a good job of it. But anyway, it was a disaster for Will.”

  Adds Kerry: “At first, Will thought Diamond Racing was really flash compared with what he’d seen in Australia, so when he was driving this Ralt and was slow, he started questioning himself rather than the car. They actually got a driver coach, Andy Priaulx [former UK Hillclimb champion, F3 race winner and future touring car World Champion] to see whether it was Will or the car that was the problem. Andy basically said: ‘There’s nothing wrong with the driver; he’s just overdriving a crap car,’ so that helped Will’s confidence a bit.”

  The situation was dire enough to prompt a decision from Power, who abruptly quit Diamond Racing during practice at Croft circuit for the third double-header event of the season. A crash brought on by trying to screw a decent lap time out of his wayward machinery was the final straw.

  “Enough was enough,” says Will. “I was trying to carry a car that I was now pretty sure wasn’t worth carrying, so I was going nowhere. I spoke with my dad and told him I’d rather do a half-season with a good team than a whole season in a shitbox, and he agreed with that approach. I mean, none of the people who’d put money into me were going to want to see their guy trailing around at the back of the field all season.”

  The abruptness of his decision left Will without a ride, and he could only watch as his former rival, Will Davison, who’d finished fourth in the previous season’s UK Formula Renault Championship, dominated that first Croft F3 race with pole position, fastest lap and victory.

  “I think that was the toughest time,” says Kerry whose budding PR skills were now forced to mature rapidly. Still not yet twenty years old, she was in a foreign land trying to find sponsorship for an out-of-work racecar driver whose only results from the season were a disaster. There were no worthwhile rides available for free, and most good teams would require a big fat wedge of cash if they were to lay on an extra car for a driver joining mid-season. So Kerry started seeking sponsors both back at home and in Britain.

  “Of course, when you’re in Britain but trying to get Australian sponsors, too, you’re up until crazy hours because of the time difference,” she points out. “When we first moved over to the UK, we lived in a little town called Wokingham, in a rented apartment that didn’t have a TV, didn’t have a landline phone and didn’t have internet. So to call Australia, we’d have to go down to the local library or use the phone at the house of Barry Locke and his wife, who Bob Power had arranged to kind of keep an eye on us.”

  It was an understandably tired-looking and forlorn young couple who turned up at Silverstone, UK, in late May 2003 for the ninth and tenth rounds of the British F3 series – or, from Power’s irritated perspective, his fifth and sixth races without a ride. To see Will spectating at a race in which he should be competing is to see a man at his most agitated. The added layer of desperation in this instance was provided by the possibility that he, Kerry and Gary would have to return home having achieved the square root of nothing during their UK stay. Those who know him well would agree that the frustration of never having had a real chance to prove himself in the world’s toughest junior single-seater series could have gnawed away at Will for several years after. Thankfully, he was about to be thrown a lifeline from an unexpected source.

  “Mark Webber and Ann Neal [Mark’s long-time partner] were at Silverstone that day,” Kerry recalls. “Mark was just starting his second season of Formula 1 but, on a free weekend, he used to go and watch how his fellow Aussies were doing in the junior categories and meet up with his old team boss, Alan Docking. Anyway, Will and I were walking around the track with Maher Algadri, and Alan Webber [Mark’s dad] came over to introduce himself and then introduced us to Mark and Ann.

  “Once we got talking, Ann could see I was trying to do similar things for Will that she’d had to do in the past for Mark, and she could see we were really serious. I guess
I must have told her we didn’t have any internet or phone line of our own and she felt sorry for us, so she asked Will and me to call by her office for a meeting to see how she and Mark could help, advise or whatever was required.”

  Says Webber: “It was my old F3 team boss Alan Docking, another Aussie, who’d first mentioned Will to me and said what he was trying to do. When I’d first come to Europe at the end of 1995, I wasn’t interested in helping fellow Aussies; I just wanted to beat them! There were quite a few trying to make an impression and they were as much my opposition as anyone else. But just about the point I was reaching F1, I thought maybe I was in a position to start giving something back. In Will’s case, it was because I wanted him to reach his potential: that was the best any of us could do to help him fulfil his hunger and keep him in Europe longer.”

  Webber explains this in a matter-of-fact manner but it can’t be emphasized enough how rare it was for young drivers to receive this kind of patronage from those further up the motorsport ranks.

  “Will and I went for this meeting,” says Kerry, “and Ann read through the press releases I’d put out about Will over the previous couple of years, and gave me some helpful tips. Remember, Will and I had only a vague idea of what we should be doing and absolutely no idea how to do it! I still didn’t have a job at that stage, either, so Ann asked if I’d spoken to any F1 teams about working in their marketing department and gaining PR experience. Eventually she invited me along to Jaguar, the team Mark was racing for that year in F1, to see if there was anything I could learn regarding how to help Will.”

  Mark was no less impressed than Ann with the pair of racing orphans they’d now semi-adopted. “What’s clear when you meet Will is that he’s very intense – you can see it in his piercing eyes,” says Webber. “It was clear he was in a difficult situation trying to get himself into competitive machinery but I loved his fiery, competitive nature. Ann and I also admired how Will and Kerry were keeping his junior career alive by leaving no stones unturned. They didn’t really know anyone around them, but they were staying very driven to make things happen, so as far as we were concerned, they deserved to be believed in.”