“Draco were interested then,” says Power. “They needed drivers for World Series by Renault, and it helped when me and Will Davison then did really well in that Minardi F1 test. Some of the Minardi engineers knew some of the guys at Draco and said, ‘Yeah, these Aussie guys were really good, got down to a time really quick.’ So then Draco called me and said they wanted me to test for them at this open test for all teams that were going to take part in the new World Series by Renault. I said, ‘I’ve got no money, so I only want to do this test if there’s something definite on the table for 2005. My immigration visa’s running out, I’ve got to go home to Australia.’
“Maybe they thought I was just playing hardball or whatever and I got on the plane home thinking, ‘That’s it, my racing career’s over.’
“Kicking around at home for a few weeks, I resigned myself to going to work for my dad in one of his businesses. I had to be realistic: the money and the results just hadn’t been quite good enough for teams to say, ‘We need this guy.’ In the end, most people look at results, and don’t care about the stories behind them; there was an old saying in Formula 1 that went something like, ‘Each race features one winner followed by nineteen excuses.’ Even the Draco F3000 and Minardi F1 tests didn’t mean much because there were no big-name drivers there to gauge my times against.
“Then I get another call from Draco, saying, ‘We’d really like you to test for us again at the Paul Ricard circuit [in France],’ and I repeated that I hadn’t been playing games – I truly had no money and no sponsor.
“Anyway, they called me back a third time with an offer where I could test for free but I couldn’t sign with anyone else. Fair enough. So I went over there, and because I wasn’t paying and some of the other people they were trying out had paid, the team couldn’t give me the whole day. But in the morning session, I was on par with Alvaro Parente, who ended up being the quickest of the test [and would win that year’s British Formula 3 title]. So they were impressed enough to offer a deal for 250,000 Euros, which was really cheap because the ride should have cost 600,000. I can’t remember why that deal fell over, but probably because even 250,000 Euros was well out of my reach. And now I couldn’t go back to the UK because I still hadn’t renewed my visa, and I remember Kerry crying on the phone. God, that really was a depressing time . . .”
Kerry Fenwick recalls: “Will went home at the end of both the 2003 and 2004 seasons, but I’d stayed in the UK working for Ann [Neal] and Mark [Webber]. And by the winter of 2004/2005, I’d honestly run out of ideas about what to do next for Will. He didn’t know what he was going to do because he had no money, and each step up the ladder to Formula 1 becomes more and more ridiculously expensive. And then one day that winter, I went into the office and Ann told me that she and Mark had decided to help us try and get Will a deal for 2005. That was an amazing turning point for us. They just really wanted to give back to the sport and could see how desperate and passionate we were about Will’s career.”
They weren’t just thinking about any old deal, either. It would be a World Series by Renault (WSR) drive with Carlin Racing – an organization that, since its foundation in 1996, had ripped up the formbook for how long it takes a new team to win races and championships in any given series. In the season just past, only its second in World Series, Carlin had taken Portuguese driver Tiago Monteiro to five wins and second in the championship.
“Will had proved to me that he was more than tenacious enough to work his nuts off while he was in Europe with nothing,” explains Webber of his career-saving gesture, “and I could see Kerry was a good influence on him, so they worked well together. And Carlin was obviously a very good team. The way Ann and I looked at it was that for Will, like most drivers with no money, it was always going to be down to luck whether he’d get the window into Formula 1. But we figured that if we at least helped him up the junior category ladder with the strongest results possible, that would be a great insurance policy for his career later on. One thing’s for sure, raw speed was never going to be an issue for Will in F1. He had plenty of that.”
Says Power: “It wasn’t just about Mark and Ann helping; it was the knock-on effect that had. For Mark, an established Formula 1 driver, to show that much faith in me was like the ultimate endorsement, and that really helped persuade Danny Wallis and Maher Algadri to again step up with more funding. Pretty amazing.”
Carlin Racing team owner Trevor Carlin was similarly amazed by both the gesture and the simplicity of the negotiations. He recalls, “My uncle, Steve, was working for us in those days and we shared an office, and I heard him on the phone having a good old chat, and when he hung up he said, ‘That was Mark Webber, asking if you’ve got a World Series seat for Will Power.’ I said, ‘Tell Mark we’d be really keen,’ because I’d seen Will race against us in Formula 3 and had been impressed. But I didn’t think anything would come of it.
“Then a couple of weeks later, Mark called again and eventually Steve said, ‘Sure, you’ve got a deal.’ It was as simple as that. We’d given Mark a price, and he told us Will had some sponsors but didn’t know if they were good for all the money, so he’d underwrite the budget and if the sponsors came up short, Mark would make up the shortfall. Couldn’t say fairer than that, so the whole deal was done in two phone calls!
“I thought that was a pretty generous gesture from Mark because it was before he hit the big time [he was just switching F1 teams from Jaguar to Williams]. And, as it happens, the sponsors did come through with the money. I think when one of the payments was a bit late we needed Mark to step in with £50,000, and he did that instantly. The whole process was totally painless.”
If Carlin had one misgiving before testing Will Power, it was that he wasn’t sure of his ultimate potential.
“I knew Will was pretty good, but how good? Hard to tell from his F3 days because Alan Docking Racing was in its swansong then. Alan is a top bloke, but we felt he hadn’t really changed his approach to Formula 3, and younger teams like ourselves had moved the game on. So we couldn’t gauge Will because we weren’t sure if the F3 cars he’d been running had been good, bad or ugly.”
Carlin’s questions about his new driver’s potential were answered rapidly when Will set pole position for the second race in the WSR’s season-opening double-header at Zolder in Belgium.
“He was right on it,” says Carlin, “and we saw that pretty much throughout the year. Will has incredible car control, so he can really hustle a car on the limit. He’d bounce across the gravel or bottom it out on a curb occasionally, but he’d never crash. It was great because although after a session you might have a bit of gravel rash to repair, or have to scoop some grass out of the undertray, he’d never make it to the wall.”
Just as Carlin enthuses about Power, so Will loved the cars and working with the team. “It’s Carlin, right, so you know it’s quality,” he says, “but I also had a guy called Daniele Rossi as my engineer, and he was great. Once he got an idea about my driving style and how it worked with a World Series car, I remember at each track I needed very few changes to make that car suit me.”
Rossi reciprocates the admiration and remains a major fan of Power’s.
“Will is still the fastest driver I’ve ever worked with,” says the Italian, “faster even than [four-time Formula 1 World Champion] Sebastian Vettel. His first tests for us were in the older Nissan-engined car, and he was second fastest at Paul Ricard and fastest at Barcelona. He was on it, straight away.”
Not everything was smooth right away though: there was, for example, a language barrier to overcome.
“That was my first year in the UK,” recalls Rossi, “and my English was not so good. I spent as much time as possible with the Carlin mechanics to learn the language but Will spoke very quick and in Australian English so he was hard to understand. One of the other engineers, who was also team manager, was also from Australia and even he struggled to understand Will. One day he said to Will, ‘How do you expect your race engine
er, who is Italian, to understand you when even I don’t understand you?!’
“But from there, we had no real problems; if Will and I were struggling to communicate, he would find a different way to explain to me what he wanted the car to do. And soon, there was real trust there; he’d trust me to make changes and I’d trust the feedback he gave me. And if we were looking at data and we saw where he could make more time, he was always keen to try something different.”
There was a positive vibe in the Carlin camp then, dampened only by some reliability issues as the series switched from Nissan to Renault power, and no less crucially, from manual gearboxes to paddle-shift.
“That year it was clearly Robert Kubica and Will who were the outstanding drivers in World Series,” says Carlin, referring to the Polish driver who’d go on to become (all too briefly) a true ace in Formula 1. “Unfortunately, we had a few things go wrong because this was the first year of the series’ new car. We had issues with the equipment, such as the electronic paddle-shift gearbox, and I’d say we were fairly unreliable by our standards, which certainly cost us a lot of points. Whether the problems hit us in qualifying or the race, it seemed like 70 per cent of the time there was always something, big or small, you know? But when things went smoothly, Will was blindingly fast. He can get a racecar to the limit and then just hold it there forever without going over the edge, and that’s perfect for the team: you know your guy’s pushing like hell and you don’t mind taping something up or whatever. As long as you’re not rebuilding a wreck, you’re fine.”
Still, Power himself wasn’t perfect. In that season-opening race where he’d set pole, he spun while leading and pulling away.
“Like I say, I think Will is the fastest driver I ever worked with,” explains Rossi, “but I think sometimes it would come so easy for him to reach the limit, especially in fast corners, he didn’t believe that was the limit and so he would push harder and then that would cause a mistake.”
Finally at Round 7, held at the Bugatti Circuit in Le Mans, Will Power became a winner for the first time in Europe. And two races later he backed this up with another win on the one-and-done street course in Bilbao, Spain.
“That was a special weekend in Bilbao,” says Rossi. “Will was so fast and so brave between the walls. I remember in particular in qualifying, he went P1 but had bounced the car off the wall and bent his suspension. Anyway, he slowed a couple of laps, feeling the car and letting the tires cool down, and then he went for it again and managed to improve his time! I think he was a second quicker than the second-fastest car in his group. Incredible. And then in the race he made no mistakes and won by nine or ten seconds.”
If that sounds like the kind of race of which the 2005 World Series by Renault champion might be proud, don’t be surprised.
“Robert Kubica and Will were cut from the same cloth,” says Kerry. “I swear if Will had reached Formula 1 and not been paid for years, it wouldn’t have mattered because he just wanted to race. Well I definitely got the impression Kubica was exactly the same. Neither of them had any interest in money or glamor, or anything like that; they wouldn’t envy drivers who had anything they didn’t have, so long as it was nothing to do with racing. Will didn’t care if he didn’t have the best suits or the best road car, or if he couldn’t afford to change his helmet every three or four races like some of the drivers. If he was in the same stinky race suit and helmet all year, that was fine: Will was just desperate to win and that year he had a powerful car, a bit of a beast that needed man-handling, and he was in his element.”
Will agrees, adding: “Our downfall that season was tire pressures in the wet, because we were running the ones they’d used in World Series by Nissan,” says Power, “and the new wet tire required much lower pressures to get the best out of it. And it seems like we were the last to know. Middle of the season we found out after the races at Oschersleben [Germany], where it rained and we were hopeless. I crashed out of the first race on Lap 5, after being on pole, and then in the second race I spun to avoid [French driver Tristan] Gommendy when we were battling for second. And then the wheel gun failed during a pit stop. That pretty much ended our championship hopes right there, because Kubica won both races.”
Rossi remembers that it wasn’t a wheel gun problem but the fact that Will hadn’t warned them he was coming for a pit stop that produced the slow time on pit lane at Oschersleben. But it didn’t matter: the game was over. What annoyed Rossi more was the broken driveshaft in the first Zolder race and the car that took Will out in Valencia.
For Will, the disappointment caused by results and ultimately falling out of the title race was eased considerably by the fact that before Oschersleben he’d received a phone call from one Derrick Walker to talk about an opportunity in the Walker Racing/Team Australia Champ Car World Series team.
Carlin recalls: “Derrick did the correct thing and called me first to discuss the opportunity and also to get my verdict on Will, and obviously I had pretty much nothing but praise for him. With that Oschersleben disaster taking him out of the running for the World Series championship, I didn’t have any problem at all with Will pursuing another opportunity, even if it meant missing a couple of rounds at the end of the year. The way I look at it, Carlin Racing’s purpose all along has been as a team that could send the best young drivers to the top, and to me this looked like a golden opportunity for Will, and I certainly wasn’t going to stand in his way. He went to America with Carlin’s best wishes, absolutely. And I’m so pleased how it’s worked out for him because he’s a great driver and a good lad. And now we’ve spread our wings and gone across to Indy Lights, we’re in the same paddock again ten years later.”
Another relationship that would end amicably following Power’s move to the States was his five-year partnership with Kerry Fenwick. To this day, Kerry still works for Mark Webber and Ann Neal, and she looks back with few regrets on the five years she spent helping a talented but struggling racecar driver. The decision to split, she suggests, was based on the need to find her own niche, her own sense of fulfillment.
“I had no life outside of racing,” she says, “because the top racing drivers need to be selfish about their careers in order to succeed. That’s not a dig at Will; that’s just a fact! I think he could have coped with a few more extra-curricular activities – I don’t think it would have hurt him to come with me to visit my family in New Zealand in an off-season, for example. But he was always paranoid around that time of year because he never had his next season’s drive secured by then. Whenever he went back to Australia he’d drive whatever he could to stay race-fit and race-sharp.
“But I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. It was totally stressful at times, but I loved the racing and I loved working hard on Will’s career because when he did well, it felt fantastic; that made all the late hours and worry worthwhile. But when he got the drive in America, the only way I could have gone with him was as his dependent: I didn’t have a work visa. And over that winter of 2005, I decided I couldn’t just spend my days hanging around racetracks with other girlfriends and wives: that just wasn’t me. I need something to do, something to give me a sense of purpose.
“Well by 2006 I was in my third year working for Ann and Mark, they had a lot of exciting projects, and things were getting busier in the office, so I decided to stay in England. And things came to a very natural and friendly end with Will. He had to do his thing, I had to do mine, and we both understood that.”
But while Kerry had found a happy place in her quest for career fulfillment, Will Power still had many, many years to go to find similar and lasting contentment.
Chapter 7
Formula 1 – an unfulfilled dream
Before Will’s story takes us from Europe to America and what would prove to be his Promised Land, it’s important to understand just what he was giving up by abandoning the European “ladder” to Formula 1.
A minuscule chance of racing in what’s regarded the world over as the absolute
peak of motorsport is enough to keep many a driver in the junior formulas for several years, spending untold millions of dollars to try to prove that he, rather than one of his rivals, is worthy of a seat in F1. But without those millions, it is usually the road to nowhere. Get on a driver scheme such as that formed by Red Bull, and you’re going to be given a fair chance to prove yourself in European Formula 3, World Series by Renault or GP2. In Red Bull’s case, that can eventually place you in its junior F1 team, Scuderia Toro Rosso, and if you continue to shine, there’s a strong chance you’ll be promoted to Red Bull Racing, the squad for whom Sebastian Vettel scored four consecutive World Championships, 2010–13.
However, even Red Bull’s financial resources are finite, and it generally supports no more than two drivers at any given level at one time. Such has been the case with most young driver schemes, ever since tobacco advertising disappeared. So drivers without that type of backing have to find alternative sources of finance, because it’s rare that even top teams in junior formulas will offer a driver a free ride. For an exceptional racer, one who shows huge potential, a team owner may offer a seat at a severely discounted price but set against that driver’s future earnings. Apparently self-made drivers may be repaying their debts with interest for several years after they make it to the top.
For Will Power, enough was enough by 2005. He estimates that, even before 2004, when his father continued to foot a large proportion of the bill for a second season of British Formula 3, Bob Power had invested a considerable amount of his savings in Will’s career. Even so, that alone wouldn’t have been enough. It had taken substantial contributions from Indonesian businessman Maher Algadri, the Australian Motor Sport Foundation (AMSF) and personal investment from Tom Warwick from the AMSF, to get him through. And without yet more backing from Mark Webber and Danny Wallis, landing a drive with Carlin Racing in World Series by Renault in 2005 would have been unlikely.
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 8