The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  The Indy 500 produced a mere fourteenth – “After the first pit stop my left-rear was loose, then fell off and detached a brake line so I didn’t have any stopping power, and the time it took to fix it put me a lap down.” But he still finished only two places behind Franchitti, who ran out of fuel in the final stint. Strangely, both would win at the next event. That year, IndyCar’s traditional 550 km race at Texas Motor Speedway was split into two races of 275 km, with each earning half points. The first was dominated by Franchitti, while Power started and finished third. The second race, held a couple of hours later, had its grid set by lottery – drivers playing to the crowd as they took it in turns to spin giant wall-mounted discs with grid positions on them. Franchitti grabbed P28, Will P3 again.

  “That was the first and maybe last time that luck went my way compared with Franchitti,” says Power, “and man, he was pissed. Understandable, though. Seriously, what sort of race is it where you pick your starting position?! Anyway, it did still feel good to get an oval win.”

  The only alarming moment for Power, other than running perilously close with polesitter Tony Kanaan as they battled for the lead, came at the end of the second stint, when Graham Rahal’s car ran out of fuel on the pit-in lane. As Power closed on him from 210 mph, he had to decide in a split second whether to stay up on the track for longer, or squeeze between the pit wall and the car that was limping along at 50 mph. Will chose the latter option in a hold-your-breath piece of onboard TV footage.

  “Ha, I’d forgotten that,” says Power. “The things you do sometimes . . .”

  Franchitti dominated Milwaukee, but Power was relatively content with his fourth place having started seventeenth after a qualifying run that looked more like a drifting competition. But at Iowa, a fifth place for Franchitti and a crash and mild concussion for Power left the reigning champion 20 points in the lead of the championship.

  That evening in America’s corn state was a turning point for Team Penske however. A major contributing factor to Power’s shunt that evening was that he was driving a car with bent steering. Why? Because of a pit lane screw-up. At the first round of pit stops, Power was sent out of his box just as the Ganassi car of Charlie Kimball was turning into his, two slots ahead. The subsequent damage to the Penske car’s steering as well as the need to repair the broken front wing had dropped it to the back of the field, even before it looped into the wall.

  So after the race, Clive Howell, who’d been with Penske for almost thirty years and had been strategist on the No. 12 since it turned full-time, asked Tim Cindric to help analyze his crew’s regular problems in the pits. Swiftly a decision was made: Cindric would transfer from Castroneves’ car to Power’s with immediate effect in order to maximize Team Penske’s championship chances. (Already, Will was the only one of the driver trio in title contention.)

  “That was the hardest thing for me – telling Helio that I needed to go try and figure out this other situation for the sake of the team,” says Cindric. “He and I had come to the team together, and I’d called every race he’d driven over eleven-and-a-half seasons. After going through his Dancing with the Stars world to the tax situation to then going to Indianapolis and winning the ‘500’ after that mess . . . we’d been through so many ups and downs together. It wasn’t just a boss and colleague situation, or strategist and driver; we were and are good friends.

  “But, yeah, the problems in the pits for No. 12 had caused mounting frustration within the team . . . especially because it always seemed to be something different that went wrong. So Clive came to me and said, ‘Hey, I don’t know what to do, maybe you could come over and figure out what’s wrong.’ So this change around wasn’t a case of me running over to the best car: I mean, Will had been our best hope in 2010, as well, and I hadn’t switched then. It was more a case of seeing all this potential that wasn’t being realized in the No. 12 camp and needing to work out what needed to be done. I felt I had to put aside my personal alliances and do what was best for the team. It certainly didn’t solve all our problems overnight, though.” True . . . but it did boost the confidence of those in the No. 12 camp, as Dave Faustino explains.

  “Tim’s switch didn’t change our general approach,” he says, “but he’s incredible at the strategy aspect, so it added to the total package. The stats may not reflect that, but it changed the game. When we came in 2010 and started smoking people on road and street courses, there was only one thing that was going to happen, which was that the top teams and driver/engineer combinations would catch up. Adding Tim pushed us forward again. It added to Will’s confidence with strategy and because Tim’s great on the radio, too, his arrival helped calm Will. I suppose it also added pressure because now the team president was on our car, but overall it was really good news.”

  By coincidence, Cindric switched at what would prove a volatile time for Power. At Toronto, their first event together, Will earned pole ahead of the Ganassi cars and the race looked set to be a fight between him and Scott Dixon, who were clearly fastest on the day. However, Franchitti jumped to the front by pitting just before a full-course caution fell and then the order was further jumbled as many drivers appeared to lose their minds and started running into each other. Nonetheless, Power made a superbly opportunistic move on Franchitti with a quarter of the race to go, and when Franchitti retaliated a few corners later, the pair made contact.

  “His left front knocked into my right-rear to spin me around,” says Power, “so what does that tell you? I outbraked him, and left room on the inside, but I had to turn in at some point, you know. His front wheels were never further along than beside my rears, so no way it’s his corner, and no way is there a chance to pass. And still he hit me. It wasn’t a mistake under braking; he was on the throttle and he had room to tighten his line or back out and he did neither.

  “At some point in a season every driver does something bad to a rival, right, but usually it’s an error of judgment and we get punished. I can guarantee you that if we’d been the other way around, I’d have been given a drive-through penalty. But Dario seemed untouchable. It was [Alex] Tagliani who dumped me in the tires and ended my day – crazy man in his home race! – but it was Franchitti who spun me to the back in the first place. So he went on and won and got 50 points, I got fifteen, and we lost the title that year by eighteen . . .”

  Power’s post-race interview on live TV – look it up on YouTube – earned him praise and criticism alike from IndyCar fans. Just as an alcoholic is defined as someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do, so a driver is either a whiner or merely outspoken, according to whether you’re his fan or not.

  Interestingly, it was Elizabeth who snapped on this occasion and encouraged her man to step up and reveal his true feelings about the situation. She says: “Dario only ever praised Dixon because he was his teammate and Kanaan because he was his buddy, whereas Will had always gone out of his way to swallow his true feelings and be complimentary of Dario in interviews. And I was just done with that BS. So I saw Will in pit lane before the TV cameras got to him and I said, ‘Enough is enough! Will, speak your mind! Do it within reason, but say how you feel.’ And he did – but then he also called Tagliani a wanker, and I was like, ‘Okay. That’s probably enough . . .’

  “Looking back, it wasn’t my most mature moment, but at the same time it at last gave Will a chance to show his personality. Either you loved him for speaking the truth, or you hated him for publicly calling out the series’ champion. Then he decided to go on Twitter – also encouraged by me – and called Dario a princess. And he gained about 10,000 followers, I guess because Ashley Judd joined in to defend her man at that time. So that weekend certainly put Will on the map a bit more.”

  It didn’t help the championship situation though, which now saw Franchitti hold a 55-point lead. Power won the next race at Edmonton, but Franchitti regained that ground and more by finishing second at Mid-Ohio with Power only fourteenth after a pit strategy that went disastrously wrong for
Team Penske. His deficit to Franchitti was now 62 points with six rounds to go. Next on the schedule was New Hampshire, a relatively flat 1.058-mile oval, and after qualifying it seemed as though Franchitti would further extend his points advantage. He was simply a cut above everyone and took an easy pole, while Power languished in thirteenth, slowest of the three Penske cars.

  “Dave and I had really focused on oval setups,” recalls Power, “but after qualifying for that race, it was someone tipping us off about Ganassi’s setup that helped us. We’d been way out to lunch, totally lost until that point, but when we tried this new setup it was night-and-day better, so much easier to drive. Still, Dario was going to win that race by a mile, probably lap the whole field, but then he collided with Sato on a restart, so it was a great opportunity to claw back some points on him.

  “I’m up to fifth when the rain comes, which obviously brings out the yellows on an oval. But then Race Control decides to restart it, even though it’s raining harder than when they’d thrown the yellow for rain – and now the track’s wet, too! All the drivers are screaming on the radio, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it’ but they green flag it anyway. Well as soon as we get on the throttle, it’s a disaster. Danica [Patrick] spins in front of me, and trying to avoid her, I’m hit by another car and spin, which causes me to get hit by Ana Beatriz and crash backward into the pit wall. I was so mad that they could restart that race in those conditions. It was a major safety risk. With the speeds we do on ovals, it’s too dangerous if there’s any moisture at all on the track.”

  And Power made his feelings known in no uncertain terms. As he walked through the paddock with Cindric and Charles Burns, head of IndyCar security, Will turned to Race Control’s booth, half-squatted, and flicked the double-birds (middle fingers). Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, it was caught live on TV . . .

  “There were extenuating circumstances – restarting on an oval when it was raining!” says Cindric. “I could understand why Will was so frustrated and he’d had a pretty hard hit there, so he had a major headache. But I’d gone down on my scooter to meet him and thought I had everything under control as I scooted alongside him. I’m just talking with him, sympathizing and trying to cool him down, and all of a sudden I turn around and he’s paused to make his feelings known. I think, ‘Whoa, what was that?! What just happened?’ He said, ‘Oh, nobody saw me.’ I said, ‘Will, I guarantee everybody saw you. We’re in the middle of the paddock.’”

  Recalls Elizabeth: “I had my radio on down at Medical with one of Dreyer & Reinbold’s drivers, Tomas Scheckter, who’d already crashed before then. But when it starts raining, I think, ‘Oh well, they’re going to have to end the race.’ Then I hear [another D&R driver] Ana Beatriz screaming over the radio, ‘We can’t go green, this is crazy!’ Sure enough though, they restart, I run to a TV and see Will’s in the pile-up, and my first instinct is to go straight back to Medical and wait for him, because I assume they’re going to check him over. Well as I’m waiting, I’m not seeing any TVs, but my mom calls me and says, ‘Get to Will! He’s lost it!’ and Will’s mom is calling my mom to say the same. I have no idea what they’re so hysterical about.

  “Finally I catch up with Will on the Penske transporter, and I’m sitting there talking to him, and Tim’s in there too and, wow, he’s wearing a real ticked-off face. So I’m thinking, ‘What’s his problem? It’s not Will’s fault it went green in terrible conditions.’ So I’m just chit-chatting away, trying to calm Will down, and suddenly my phone starts blowing up. First text I get is Julia Wilson, Justin’s wife, and she says, ‘Your husband is a rock star! I love him!’ And with it she sends a screen grab of Will doing his thing to Race Control. My mouth drops open, I almost drop my phone; I just think, ‘Ohhhhh my goodness.’

  “Tim starts chuckling as he sees my reaction. He says, ‘You didn’t know?’ I look across at Will, who just sighs, ‘Yeah, I did it.’ I say, ‘But what about Verizon? And Shell? And . . . Oh crap.’ Tim says, ‘Okay, so we’re all on the same page at last.’”

  “Everyone understood that race should never have been restarted,” says Cindric. “Who couldn’t sympathize with Will being upset? But the fact that his gesture got into the media and therefore the public is something that had to be addressed. If you’re backed by Fortune 500 companies, there are going to be negative ramifications. So I think that was the weekend Will was forced to remember whom he was representing. I mean, Verizon had fun with it to the extent of even presenting Will with mittens, but there was an underlying seriousness, too – it wouldn’t be tolerated again. And he understood that.”

  “Will of course started feeling remorseful straight away,” says Liz, “and he called his sponsors to apologize. Then as he’s going to a press conference, all the mechanics – the poor guys with broken cars to fix – stop what they’re doing to come out of their garages and applaud him. That helped him to realize, ‘Okay, that wasn’t the way for me to show what I was thinking, but at least these people understand how insane it was to restart that race in the rain.’ Luckily, IndyCar reversed the results to how the order had been before that stupid restart so Will got fifth place. That was a big deal because Dario was only classified twentieth.”

  Derrick Walker remarks, “I spoke to Will before the next race. I totally sympathized with how upset he’d been, but with that race coming just a month after his outburst in Toronto, I just wanted him to calm down. I told him, ‘You drive for Penske. You do not want to become known as that guy who’s always ranting publicly. Roger expects better from his drivers. Say what you’ve got to say behind closed doors.’”

  As usual, Walker was spot on in assessing the team owner’s stance. “I could understand Will’s frustration after the Toronto incident and he certainly said what he felt at the time,” remarks Penske. Regarding the New Hampshire incident, he adds: “Racing is an emotional sport and sometimes you say or do things in the heat of the moment you later wish you hadn’t done. We want Will and the rest of our drivers to be themselves and say what they believe but they also have to realize they represent not only our team but also our partners. That’s something we always want them to keep in mind.”

  Thereafter, Will kept his head down – although he was amused to see that fans at the next race, at Sonoma, had started a collection to help him pay the fine IndyCar had levied for “actions detrimental to the sport.” One of his rivals said at the time, “Restarting an oval race in the wet was much more detrimental to the sport than anything Will did! Are they going to fine themselves, too?”

  But now it was time for the serious business to begin again. Power led a Penske 1-2-3 at Sonoma on a day when Franchitti finished fourth, and thus cut into Dario’s points lead, and when he also won on the streets of Baltimore, again with his nemesis in fourth, the Penske ace was right back in the championship hunt.

  That sixth win of the season was also one of Power’s finest drives. The way the yellow flags fell at Baltimore meant that Power’s two-stop strategy was not the obvious way to go, and he had to carve a dozen “qualifying” laps to beat the three-stopping Oriol Servià and Tony Kanaan.

  “That was all him, man,” said an elated Cindric afterward. “Will had to gain two to three seconds a lap on Servià to beat those guys, and he did it. He was unbelievable.”

  Afterward, Servià commented of his old teammate: “Those situations are just reminders of how much Will has in reserve sometimes, particularly at this type of track. You know, with that speed advantage, even if he’d come out of the pits behind myself and Kanaan, I think he’d have passed us anyway. Honestly, I’m pleased with second because I don’t think anyone else had a chance today . . .”

  The victory meant Power pulled within five points of Franchitti, and when he nailed second behind Scott Dixon on Japan’s Motegi road course, with Franchitti only eighth, Will rose to the top of the championship table by a 13-point margin. Many tipped Franchitti to still prevail, given that the final two races were on ovals, but
Power made them think again with a dominant performance in qualifying and the first quarter of the race at the penultimate round at Kentucky.

  However, as he drove into his pit box for his first stop, so Ana Beatriz departed her Dreyer & Reinbold pit box, situated immediately behind Power’s. A collision was inevitable and Ana’s front wing slashed into Will’s sidepod. Thereafter, his car continued to handle well but the aerodynamic drag caused by the damage and attempted repairs meant it was 3–4 mph slower, and it was all he could do to hang on to the backmarkers. Meanwhile, Franchitti was narrowly beaten to second and moved into an 18-point lead in the championship.

  “Even now, I can’t believe that happened,” sighs Power. “Dave and I had worked so hard on that race, the boys back at the shop had done everything they could to lose some weight from the car so we had some ballast to move around, so the car was hooked up handling-wise. And the engine was probably at its best – they all had to be within one per cent of each other or something, and I reckon ours was at its peak. And then Alex Tagliani, who wasn’t in the race, had very generously given me some hints at how to set up the car. We had everything going for us: the car was a rocket. I could have gone a lap down and got my lap back and won. That’s how superior my car was that day.”

  Cindric agrees. “Will had dominated the race, and if you watched Ana’s pit stop it wasn’t normal. Initially I’d thought she’d be long gone before we came in, but they were fixing a problem and it took forever, so I thought they’d leave her there just as we were coming in because they’d already lost so much time. But she literally went as Will got there and he was completely blindsided. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I would have told Will to slow down early and let her out if I thought that was going to happen. Without that, he’d have won by a mile and clinched the championship.”