The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  “I think I only told Will on the Thursday that we had another car on standby for him should Helio get cleared, but I was also able to tell him that Roger would run a third car for him at Indianapolis that year as a minimum. That was a big deal for Will and he seemed very appreciative, and that was a big deal for us because his car was going to be funded by a new sponsor who’d stepped up, Verizon.”

  Will kept this information to himself and came across as a strange mix of relaxed and melancholic on that Thursday before the weekend’s action commenced. “God, this team, man,” he sighed. “Penske is like I’d imagine a Formula 1 team to be; it’s so professional. I already don’t want to be anywhere else, so if they could only run me part-time for another year after this, I’d take it. Anything to be here, you know?” Six years later he confirms, “Yup, that was totally how I felt. There was nothing else on my radar. I was 100 per cent focused on staying at Penske and proving myself to them.”

  And that was something he started doing the next day, first day of practice for the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. The No. 3 Team Penske entry swiftly went to the top of the times in the morning session. Then, as Cindric recalls, “With about eight minutes left in the session, I get a text saying the verdict has come out in Helio’s favor. Obviously that was awesome to hear, but at the end of the session, I had to say to Will: ‘Okay, so the good news is, we’re P1. The good news and bad news is that Helio has been cleared and he’s on his way.’”

  There was a hastily convened press conference at 1 pm in the Long Beach Convention Center, where Cindric was able to announce that yes, Castroneves was flying to California to reclaim his No. 3 car tomorrow morning. However, thanks to Verizon, there was another car here ready to go for Power tomorrow and, by way of thank you, he’d also get a third Team Penske entry in the Indy 500. Any other plans to run Will, later this season, asked the assembled media? ‘Not something we’ve even discussed,’ was the tone of the reply.

  Alongside Tim, Power smiled bravely – or didn’t grimace, at least – and expressed his gratitude for the chance so far, and the chances to come. Then he went out and topped the afternoon session in Helio’s car, while Penske’s sports car crew wheeled out the black No. 12 Dallara with the Verizon flashes on the side. As they started preparing it for action the next day, an extra pit berth was added at the entrance to pit lane.

  “Obviously the No. 12 entry hadn’t even existed in St Pete, so it had no points on the board at that stage,” says Power, “but I was okay with that because it meant I had an easy route into my pit box with no cars to swerve around if we all pitted together. And at least I had a ride . . . and in a good car, too. The team had done a really nice job of transferring all my settings to the new car, so it felt really ready for me. The crew was different, the engineer was different, but if Team Penske gives you the tools, you’ve got no excuses, right?

  “In qualifying, Helio and Ryan got eliminated before the Fast Six but we got through, so Roger came down pit lane and joined my pit stand. That was the first time I’d had him on the radio, and man, he was so decisive. No bullshit. ‘Okay, let’s go!’ he said at the start of the session, so I go out and do what I think is a pretty mega lap, get P1, then come into the pits. I say, ‘I don’t think I can go any faster,’ but he’s very, ‘Come on! Put some more tires on! Go out!’ and I think I did improve on that second run and held onto pole. I come in, Roger smiles and yells, ‘Good job!’ and then he’s off. Never saw him again. Brilliant!”

  “The Verizon people weren’t there but I heard they were beside themselves with excitement,” recalls Power’s proud future mother-in-law, Kathy. “This was their first taste of being the primary sponsor on an Indy car and Will puts them on pole at one of the biggest races of the year which, after the Helio thing, makes Verizon a big deal in the sports news for Sunday. It was a pretty neat story, but that’s the amazing thing about Will. When I’m under pressure like that, I fold, and Liz is the same way. But Will – he rises to the occasion every time he’s got to put it all on the line.”

  “We were easily quick enough to win the race, too,” adds Power. “I was leading comfortably, had the engine turned down and was saving so much fuel and had so much time in hand. But then we had an electrical problem – maybe because it was a brand new car so the bug hadn’t been discovered – and that messed up the radio reception and wiped out some of the dashboard readout, so I was relying on pit signals. When I saw a car in a run-off zone and then waved yellows, I assumed it was a full-course caution so I backed off. Suddenly two cars go by me and I think, ‘What the hell? Oh shit, the race is still going . . .’ Anyway, [Dario] Franchitti had already made a stop a lap earlier, and then they do throw the full-course caution because someone else has gone off. So when the rest of us pit, we’ve lost track position and he’s in front. Then, because I don’t have radio contact with the team, I have no idea how many laps I have left in the race, and so I’m sitting there saving fuel because I don’t know if I’ll have enough to make it to the end. Anyway, we ended up second, which I was a bit pissed about at the time, but it’s funny looking back and realizing that as a substitute driver, I was now second in the championship behind only Dario!”

  A memorable weekend all-round for Team Penske, then, and Will Power had played an intrinsic and positive part in that. He hated attending the Kansas race as a spectator, but he couldn’t help but be excited at entering the Indianapolis 500 for the event’s most successful team even though he hardly needed reminding that he was a relative novice on ovals. He thus took a humble approach to his second ever Month of May at the world’s most storied racetrack, and his first with a victory-contending team. It was at this point that he really started bonding with the team’s resident driver guru, Rick Mears.

  The Wichita, Kansas–born Mears was brought up in Bakersfield, California, and is the mildest, least ego-burdened racing genius you could hope to find in any racing paddock in the world. The three-time IndyCar champion was the master of Indianapolis – he is one of only three drivers, along with AJ Foyt and Al Unser, to have won the world’s biggest race four times, and also holds the outright record for poles there, with six. In fact, qualifying at Indianapolis Motor Speedway was a Mears specialty, starting the “500” from the front row eleven times out of fifteen, and he was the cornerstone of Penske’s success there for more than a decade. Yet when he retired from racing at the end of 1992, he was perhaps too modest to realize how good a driver coach and teacher he would become; Roger Penske, by contrast, was fully aware of what Mears still had to offer the next generation of drivers (and the next after that) and has retained him in this role ever since.

  Mears had been immediately impressed by Will Power on his arrival in the team and, as thinking men who try to get their arms around the technical and engineering side of the sport while also constantly working on self-improvement, they are kindred spirits.

  “To me, Derrick Walker had done a really good job with Will in their two years together,” says Mears. “Will then had that unsettled year in 2008, but I think Derrick – perhaps because he was an ex-Penske guy – knew how to coax the best from what was a big but still quite raw talent. By the time Will came on board with us, I could see after just a couple of races watching him at work that he had all the ability and all the talent to be a championship contender. In other words, he had the tools already. At that point it becomes a case of, ‘What will he do with them? How will he use them? How well can he take advantage of everything this team has to offer?’”

  One of Mears’s most important duties for Power through May 2009 was to keep him focused on Indy alone. For all anyone knew, this was Will’s final race for Team Penske, and it was important to not let that fact bloom into a distraction nor create a sense of desperation. A desperate driver on an oval is one liable to make a crucial mistake.

  “At least you can afford to make mistakes on road and street courses,” says Mears. “Make a mistake at 200 mph-plus and you’ve got bigger consequences to
deal with, both in terms of the car and your own confidence. And however skilled you are, learning oval racing isn’t something you just know how to deal with instinctively; it’s a learning process and learning comes from experience. The more laps you do, the more you keep raising where your comfort level is at, then you keep going to the next level and the next level. And without even noticing it, you develop an automatic, in-built patience to not overstep it. There’s no substitute for experience on the speedways, and you learn nothing if you’re sitting on pit wall after breaking your car.”

  If Mears had swiftly become a fan of Power’s, so Power had pinpointed what it was about Mears that kept him walking the tightrope without falling off.

  “Rick’s always been very good to talk to about the ovals, but actually just driving in general,” says Power. “His mental approach to racing is, to me, absolutely right: just worry about the things you can control. It means you’re not wasting brain power worrying about things that, yeah, could go wrong but you don’t have any way of making them go right. So he had – and still has – this very good, methodical approach to racing. He was very good at cutting out emotions as he got into the cockpit, very good at understanding what the car needed to improve it, very good at only revealing his pace at the last minute, and so on.

  “But that first Month of May with Penske, what he was really emphasizing to me was, ‘No matter what we talk about, however much we talk about it, there’s no substitute for experience and you only get that from completing laps.’ If I had any questions, I really leaned on Rick, but he knew and I knew that what I had to do was go out there and do it myself.”

  Will Power’s competitive fire had to be dampened slightly when it came to qualifying that year. After joining his teammates in the Fast Nine qualifying shootout, he wasn’t given a second chance to aim higher. “I’d have qualified much further forward if they’d given me another run, and at the time I was like, ‘Why won’t they let me do that?’ But basically, they didn’t want to take risks with me.”

  “Right: racing is about risk versus reward,” says Mears, “and the perspectives of a driver and his team can be very different. Will’s risk versus reward perspective that year was probably, ‘Make another run; what’s the risk?!’ The team perspective was more like, ‘You’re in the Fast Nine, our other two cars are on the front row, don’t risk another run. You’re already doing exactly the job we want you to do.’ And that’s life as a team player and as a part-timer. It can take ten days of solid running at Indianapolis Motor Speedway to build up your confidence to a level where you’re competing for the front row, and less than ten seconds to have all that confidence disappear in a 220 mph crash.”

  Ironically, that decision to leave Power on the outside of the third row could have left him in harm’s way come race day.

  “Yeah,” says Power, “my only big worry came on the first lap when Marco Andretti and Mario Moraes [Faustino’s new driver at KV] crashed into the wall in front of me. At those speeds, it’s always kind of the luck of the draw as to which way the cars might go, but fortunately they stayed high and I was already hugging the inside line, so they were well out of my way.

  “Helio won that Indy 500 for Penske, and I was obviously happy to see Roger get his fifteenth win there. But, yeah, I do wonder if I could have won. Nigel Beresford and me had got a really good setup on the car that made it easy to drive but also fast, which isn’t always the same thing on an oval. I ran third, then got past [defending race winner] Dixon and then closed on Helio and had a look at passing him for the lead. In fact, he had to turn up his fuel mixture to keep me behind, so that was something that was going to work in my favor too. But then there was a late caution [Lap 162 of 200], we all pitted together and there was a problem at my right-rear and so I came out of the pits in sixth. I had time to get past one car before the end, but that was it; fifth place.”

  If the race result wasn’t what Will had been hoping for, his fast and faultless Month of May had the desired effect on the man he most needed to convince.

  “Will’s performance and result at Indy that year certainly were impressive,” recalls Roger Penske. “Our whole team and our new partner, Verizon, were very encouraged by how well he’d performed, especially with the limited oval experience he had at that time. I remember meeting with Will the day after the race and telling him that we would continue to try and keep him racing in as many events as we could that season.”

  Nothing immediate, though, and so Power would miss the next five races – Milwaukee, Texas, Iowa, Richmond and Watkins Glen – before the audition would resume in the Canadian double-header, on the streets of Toronto and at the airport course at Edmonton, Alberta. This time the funding was coming from Roger’s own business empire – Penske Truck Rental. The Captain was clearly eager to discover the consistency with which Will could deliver these top performances, and was perhaps also hoping to show Verizon that it could continue to be associated with this bold new act in a third Penske car.

  At Toronto, Power qualified second alongside Franchitti and, as at Long Beach, he blew away his teammates against the stopwatch. But as the field streamed through the final turn to take the green flag at the start of the race, Graham Rahal’s car had its nose already alongside Power’s car and the front wing sliced into Will’s right-rear tire. Penske No. 12 slithered into a run-off area before its driver limped it back to the pits, but then, with healthy equipment once more, Will started laying down some super-quick laps and, helped along by smart pit calls from strategist John Erickson, he climbed through the field.

  When he got up behind Castroneves, Power radioed in, “Shall I pass him?” and receiving a reply in the negative, he held station, saving fuel. Then, at the next round of pit stops, as others dived into the pits, Will had enough pace, space and gas to carve more superfast laps so that he emerged from his own pit stop firmly in the top five. At the final restart, he was third, behind only leader Franchitti and his own teammate Briscoe, so before taking the green flag, Will radioed the team. “Tell Ryan to go for it at the restart; I won’t attack him.” Basically, Power’s plan was to back up the field as they rolled to the green flag, and thus allow his teammate to go head to head with his championship rival without distraction. It was a gesture on Will’s part, a thank you to the team that had given him his chance, and it was doubtless appreciated by the staff.

  “It was the right thing to do,” shrugs Power. “Ryan was the guy in the title battle, I was just part-time, so if I could help the full-timers, that’s what I should do. It was a pity though, because Ryan was struggling in that final stint with a deflating tire and couldn’t fight for the win, whereas I think I could have challenged Dario.”

  In some ways, certainly from Power’s perspective, it’s interesting to consider what might have been. Franchitti being the smart operator that he is, there’s no way he’d have pushed his luck taking the battle to a part-timer who had nothing to lose and everything to prove, and so a Power victory possibly went missing that day. Either way, however, it would have made no difference to the title battle. Had Power won and Franchitti and Briscoe finished second and third instead of first and second, it would still have been the Chip Ganassi Racing driver who’d have won the title that year.

  What was becoming apparent to every IndyCar fan now was that whenever Penske ran three cars at a road or street course, it was the third man who was the team’s pace setter. Some expressed surprise at this, presumably because they’d either failed to watch Champ Car, or failed to notice Power’s speed between the miscues at KV. But Power dismisses his superiority in pace with logic.

  “I had less to learn than Helio and Ryan because they’d not had to go into that same level of detail when they were on road courses in the Indy Racing League – there just weren’t enough of those races on the old IRL schedule. But in Champ Car, because road and street courses were what we were racing on all the time, we were always looking at the real fine points of improving ourselves.

  �
��And anyway, it’s not like Briscoe and Helio were always way back. Didn’t we qualify 1-2-3 at Edmonton?”

  They did – Penske’s most dominant display in qualifying for fifteen years, and only two-tenths of a seconds covered the trio, although again it was Power at the top. Leading from the start, he made his escape and pulled out a ten-second lead in the opening stint, but was it just posturing? Would he have to give it all back if Briscoe ran second in order to help his compatriot’s championship chances? Power knew better.

  “Penske doesn’t operate like that,” he says. “If you’re in the position to win, you go and win. If Ryan had been the next guy behind me at the checkered flag, that meant he’d still have beaten the guys he’d been fighting in the championship, so Roger and Tim wouldn’t take a win away from me. So I took off and tried to get as big a gap as possible, because obviously as part-timers, our pit box was still at the entrance to pit lane, and I didn’t want anyone short-fueling in their pit stops in order to get in front of me. Basically, in those circumstances, if you make a pit stop under racing conditions – so, not under a full-course caution – you don’t want it to be on the same lap as your rivals. They’ll see you coming down the pit lane and stop their refueling just in time to get their car out in front. If you’ve saved enough fuel and your tires are in good enough shape to go one or maybe even two laps longer, then you can use those laps to go much quicker than they can when they’re on new but cold tires and carrying the weight penalty of a full tank of fuel. The other thing is that if you’ve saved two laps of fuel and only go a lap longer than the others, then that means you’ve got a lap’s worth of fuel still in there when you stop, so it takes the fuel guy less time to fill the tank, so it shortens your stop.