The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “Well I think in 2008, as his first season of experiencing that full mix of tracks, we were there watching Will ask himself that question race after race. And you know what? He came up with the right answer eventually, because look at him now: he’s a tremendous oval racer.”

  In late summer Power started to accept that he wasn’t fighting for his ride at KV: he’d be gone, come what may. Meanwhile Liz had been helping out informally in the hospitality tent for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing that season and had developed a good relationship with team owners Robbie Buhl and Dennis Reinbold. They asked her what Will’s plans were for 2009, as they were very interested, and eventually Will met with the team a couple of times. In an ideal world, Power would have chosen to stay with KV, because he believed in the team’s potential and he believes in continuity, but it was increasingly apparent that the IndyCar paddock was a less-than-ideal world. He knew he had to look elsewhere, and Dreyer & Reinbold became one interesting potential option. Another was much further afield, driving for the Alan Docking–run Team Australia in the A1GP series.

  “I was shocked to hear Will take that idea so seriously,” says Elizabeth. “I was privy to knowledge that the series’ future did not look good – people weren’t getting paid, races were under threat, and so on. Will kept telling me, ‘You don’t understand, I have to keep racing, this is all I have and they [A1GP Team Australia] say that even if I get another ride in IndyCar, they’ll work around that.’

  “But that wasn’t true: in the contract small-print it said they weren’t going to be so lenient if they were in a championship-winning position. Well, believe me, that was just one of many red flags in that contract – I could see so many issues and I’m no lawyer. Basically, if Will signed that contract, it would restrict any chance he had of an IndyCar ride, so I was dead set against it.”

  “Liz kept saying, ‘Do not sign that contract! What if Ganassi or Penske have a seat going?’” says Power. “But I knew there was no way that was going to happen. I was saying, ‘You’re supposed to be supportive,’ and she was saying, ‘I love you but I think you’re crazy if you sign up for A1GP.’ So of course I signed . . .

  “It was one of the most stressful times in my life. I remember flying to the Sonoma race a couple of days early to stay at Kalkhoven’s house – and Gore was there too – and while I was sitting on the plane, tears started rolling down my face and I’m sure the guy in the next seat was wondering what the hell was wrong with me. When I got there, Kevin and Craig still couldn’t tell me whether I had a ride for the next year but they wouldn’t tell me I didn’t have one, either. Looking back now, I guess maybe they didn’t even know what their own future together was going to be, so it was probably all up in the air; to them, sorting out a driver contract was not a big thing in comparison. But they didn’t understand it was everything to me. That’s why this feeling of insecurity about the next season was making me screw up on the track. Racing is my life and I didn’t have anything sorted for 2009.”

  Yet at the same time, Power now knew in his heart of hearts he didn’t want to quit IndyCar. Three days after mailing the signed A1GP contract he rang Elizabeth from Sonoma, begging her to ask Derrick Walker to get him out of the deal. Walker had been the one who’d made the initial (re-)introduction to the A1GP organization, and Power had taken the negotiation from there, much against Liz’s wishes. At least now she could rejoice that commonsense had won through . . .

  “Yes, but Will also told me that if he didn’t get an IndyCar ride for 2009, he’d hold it against me forever!” says Liz. “To which I replied, ‘And if you do get something, Will Power, I will remind you until the day I die that I was right!’ Which (of course!) I was. He got something for 2009 and A1GP collapsed a few months later.”

  Before the 2008 season ended there was a spark of encouragement for Power, then a cold (and way too early) shower. The championship finale at Chicagoland Speedway – one of Power’s cursed 1.5-mile ovals – saw him finish fifth, beaten only by IRL veteran drivers in cars from IRL stalwart teams Penske, Ganassi and Andretti Green. No less significant was that he’d beaten recognized oval aces Dan Wheldon and Marco Andretti.

  Says Power: “It was the first oval race where I felt a bit of confidence and could drive different lines, so that was a huge improvement. It was obvious that Dave was really getting his head around the setup for ovals, and I’m sure if we’d had the same tricks as the other teams aero-wise, we’d have been even better.”

  “Got to give a lot of credit here to Oriol Servià,” adds Faustino. “I thought Will and Oriol made really good teammates, and Oriol had done a lot of oval racing back when CART still had a nearer 50/50 split of ovals and road/street courses, so his feedback was great to have. I’d have been happy to have both of them at KV the following year, but then I realized the team wanted drivers who brought sponsorship, so we lost them both.”

  “Yeah, Dave’s right,” sighs Vasser. “That was a great lineup and we could have won races together the next year, but what can you do? We needed to make the team run as a business, too.”

  Power headed into the off-season with nothing to consider as a lead for 2009, other than preliminary talks with Dreyer & Reinbold and, just three days after that Chicago finale, with V8 Supercar team Stone Brothers Racing. Jimmy and Ross Stone had run a customer car for Will’s old V8 Supercar contact and friend Mark Larkham in the late 1990s, had run the Jason Bright/Steve Richards–driven Ford Falcon to victory in the famous Bathurst 1000 in 1998, and had eventually won three straight championships with Marcos Ambrose and Russell Ingall, 2003–05. In other words, an SBR Ford Falcon was an enticing prospect.

  But Ross Stone, while admitting that he and Jimmy were very interested in Power and confirming they had a ride available alongside Shane Van Gisbergen for 2009, urged Will to self-analyze and check whether his heart was truly in this career change.

  “My thoughts are that the first thing you would need to get your head around is that racing V8s is by no means a soft option,” Ross wrote in a follow-up email. “The second thing, which I know is going to be a hard call for you, is that the dream of F1 or winning the Indy 500 would need to be behind you. I liken it to a book you would write about your life; that chapter must close and a new chapter would open 1 January 2009.”

  Wise words indeed, and ones that Power took to heart. Could he really give up on the American Dream, without being forever haunted by thoughts of what might have been in open-wheel racing?

  It was a decision he’d postpone for now. He had one last chance to impress prospective IndyCar employers at the Surfers Paradise race. As Elizabeth mentioned earlier, it had now been declared non-championship, as Chicagoland operator ISC had inked its contract with IndyCar on the understanding that it was hosting the season finale and therefore (it hoped) the championship-decider. Nonetheless, all teams had to go Down Under, so Power would still be facing all the usual suspects.

  Before that, however, there was some news of potentially huge significance. The winner of the Chicago race and runner-up in the 2008 championship, Penske’s Helio Castroneves, was racing one of Team Penske’s Porsche sportscars in the Petit Le Mans race at Road Atlanta when Helio’s world was rocked to its core. He was charged with tax evasion by the Internal Revenue Service; were he to be found guilty, he could face a prison sentence long enough to end his topline racing career. At the time, the prospects did not look good for one of IndyCar’s most popular drivers, who just a year earlier had won TV’s Dancing with the Stars contest and introduced the series to a whole new audience.

  “I saw this on the news,” remembers Elizabeth, “and I called Derrick, who was down at Road Atlanta. He’d heard it too and said, ‘Yeah, I’m already heading over to talk to Roger Penske . . .’

  “And that’s where a seed got planted. After that meeting, Will was quite hopeful at first, but then the rumor on the street and even in the news was that Roger would pick Sam Hornish.”

  Yet that rumor made little sense. Having won
the Indy 500 and IndyCar title for Penske in 2006, Hornish had switched to The Captain’s NASCAR team at the end of 2007, so was now a year into his stock car career. RP, being a pragmatic person, was well aware that this shift in racing categories was connected to the increased number of road/street course events on the IndyCar calendar. Sam was simply not an ace at throwing right-handers in with the left-handers, and the idea that Roger would now switch back and settle for an oval specialist was laughable.

  “Right, and yet somehow Will was convinced!” says Liz. “But at least it pushed him into calling [Team Penske president] Tim Cindric and starting a dialogue with him.”

  Following up that conversation with a victory at Surfers Paradise could only help, and after qualifying, that looked a strong possibility. For the third consecutive year, it was Will Power on pole, this time by the huge margin of eight-tenths of a second.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to say that was a pretty mega time,” says Power, “because it had been wet at the start of qualifying and then the track was drying – a kind of awkward session. But during the race, we’re leading early on and I hit the wall with my left front. I wasn’t going too fast and lost control, I just hit the wall. What a wanker. Man, I could not do anything right that year. Absolutely nothing. And it was so annoying because I had the speed.”

  While mentally beating himself up that evening, he still dragged himself to the after-race party and tried not to look too miserable as he watched fellow Australian and Penske’s other driver, Ryan Briscoe, celebrating victory. Apparently, though, Power’s demeanor gave him away . . .

  Says Cindric: “I saw Will that night, and I could tell he was totally distraught; he was there because he had to be, not having any fun at all. That race, he’d run away from the field and then put it in the fence, so I made some comment to raise the subject. He said, ‘Yeah, all down to me. I just screwed up.’ So that was refreshing. I didn’t get told that the brakes were fading, or that the tires were going away; he was just very matter of fact. And so that was the impression he left me with: very fast in a car that really wasn’t a championship car, and then honest out of the cockpit.”

  In light of his on-track faux pas, however, Power certainly didn’t feel it appropriate at that moment to raise the subject of who might be driving Penske car No. 3 should Castroneves be unavailable. What maddened Elizabeth though, was that he hadn’t talked to Cindric earlier in the trip Down Under.

  “I’d stayed in America,” she says, “so when Will got back I asked him if he spoke to Tim, and he said, ‘No, I didn’t want to disturb him on a race weekend’ – typical Will – ‘but I saw Justin Wilson talking to him.’ I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, and that’s what you should have been doing too . . .’”

  Power flew back from Australia to the IndyCar Awards celebration at Las Vegas – another party, another night of smiling bravely through gritted teeth. In a particularly morose mood, he confessed privately that he’d “got nothing lined up for 2009. I’m speaking to one team [Dreyer & Reinbold] but we’re a long way from getting anything sorted.”

  Was staying at KV a possibility?

  “Nah, I don’t think so,” he murmured. “They need money for next year. Plus if they keep either of us, it will be Oriol, I’m pretty sure.”

  There have been many talented drivers who’ve gone through these anxious periods at contract time. But it seemed impossible to believe that a three-time race winner, a guy who just a week earlier had held everyone’s feet to the flames with his sheer pace on one of the world’s most fearsome street circuits, could be without a ride for 2009. Sure, his mistakes this season past had been costly and he didn’t yet have the experience of new and two-time IndyCar champion Scott Dixon. In terms of newly free agents, maybe Justin Wilson (who’d won in Detroit for Newman/Haas) could be regarded as the more complete package at this stage. But Power’s potential, if it could be harnessed in a less volatile and more Walker-style environment, was immensely obvious and obviously immense.

  Not even Elizabeth getting brought on stage by the Awards’ hosts, Penn & Teller, could completely cheer up her boyfriend that night, and yet a very different brand of magic was just a couple of weeks and a couple of phone calls away.

  A few days after returning home to Indianapolis and realizing that yes, he’d missed an opportunity in Australia to have a serious follow-up talk with Cindric, Will dialed the Penske prez again. At the end of a brief chat, he was told he’d get a call “if there’s any interest.”

  Mere days before Thanksgiving, the phone rang. It was Cindric.

  “Can you come for an interview with Roger in Detroit?”

  Chapter 12

  The big chance

  The large empty room was mainly dark, the primary source of illumination being the harsh glare of a spotlight that was shining on the face of a young man sitting in a chair. He was mumbling answers to questions put to him by a voice that emanated from the darkness behind the light, and he could also see a small pin of red light from a video camera that was trained on him. The seat was uncomfortable, the light was too bright, and he could hear himself stumbling over the replies. He was shifting in his seat, obviously ill-at-ease, and after two hours of this his body language indicated defeat. Think of the dentist’s-chair scenes from Marathon Man but without the violence.

  For twelve days this routine went on, and by the end the interviewee’s answers were more succinct, his demeanor more impressive. He sounded enthusiastic, decisive and lucid, and his response time was sharper. Here was a smart 27-year-old heading for the biggest job interview of his life.

  “When Will hung up the phone after Tim [Cindric] had called him to Detroit, we had two weeks,” recalls Elizabeth Power. “Two weeks to prepare Will for what he might have to face at the interview. And so Derrick and I formulated these questions and every day Will would come into the Walker Racing shop and we’d do a mock interview. Derrick was trying everything to make him nervous – or simulate nervousness, I suppose – so we had a spotlight on him, and I’d set up a camera. Derrick would then ask Roger Penske–type questions of Will for up to two hours, and we’d watch the interview on playback afterward and take notes. And by the end of each session, we’d have a list – ‘You need to work on this, you need to work on that,’ etc. Derrick knew Roger and so he knew what Roger would expect.”

  At Penske Corp, meanwhile, there was another somewhat smaller list. Potential candidates to sub for Helio Castroneves during his tax trial.

  “When Helio’s case came up, obviously I was contacted by a lot of people with ideas of who to put in the No. 3 car,” recalls Cindric. “I don’t think a day went by without someone getting in touch about it. And, as the proceedings began and the clock ticked on, we appreciated that, yeah, we’re going to run that car and we need to figure out who’ll drive it.

  “What stood out to us with Will was the dominance he’d shown in Surfers up until his accident . . . although from a marketing perspective, he also had the coolest name! But seriously, we had four or five options and they were all very similar when you looked at their statistics on paper; no one really stood out over anyone else, so we decided, ‘Okay, let’s go talk to some of these guys.’”

  Liz says: “As it got closer, Derrick said to me, ‘We need to make a résumé for Will, full of stats and facts and background info. Make five copies; you never know how many people Roger might have in his meeting, and you want them all to have a copy.’

  “Then he made a list of things for Will to make sure he didn’t do. I’ve kept it somewhere because it’s really funny. One of the items I remember was ‘No organ stops!’ meaning that eyes-out-on-stalks, deer-in-the-headlights look. Another one was, ‘Don’t talk like you have food in your mouth!’ And so on.

  “Anyway, you get the idea of how seriously we were taking this! Derrick told Will to wear a suit and a red tie – I can’t remember why it had to be red – but Mom and I were checking and fussing that he had everything. He flew up to Detroit the day before, 30 Novemb
er, with all his smart clothes in a hanging bag, because we didn’t want him ironing his shirt and burning it or something. Believe me, Mom and I thought of everything!”

  “Derrick had warned me,” recalls Power, “‘There’s one question I guarantee you Roger will ask. He’s going to ask you about what happened in the last race, Surfers Paradise. And believe me, he will already be testing you to see if you come up with any excuses for crashing. How you answer that question will set the tone for your whole interview. So be honest: tell him you messed up.’ I thought that was pretty obvious, but whatever.

  “Next morning, I went down to the hotel lobby and met Tim, and we went to Penske Corporation. So in the room were Roger, Tim and Bud Denker [Penske Corp senior VP]. First comment from Roger: ‘Hello Will. Thanks for giving us that win down in Australia.’ I had to smile. I was thinking, ‘Man, does Derrick know Roger or what?!’ But I said: ‘Yeah, it was a bad screw-up,’ kinda thing.

  “I honestly can’t recall much about the rest of the interview except thinking that I sucked at it . . . Actually, I do remember them asking me what I thought of Sébastien Bourdais – ‘You’ve raced against him, what do you think?’

  “I said, ‘Well, he was with a very good team but, yeah, he’s very good too.’ I guess they were trying to get a feel for my personality – does this guy say it how it is, or does he bullshit around?’”

  Roger Penske liked what he heard. He says: “We could tell from that first meeting that Will was very genuine and very honest. He owned up to what happened in the Surfers Paradise race but he was also confident in his abilities, and we already knew what he was capable of on the racetrack. Even before he joined Team Penske, he was among the quickest drivers in the series on road and street courses, and he just needed experience on the ovals.”