The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  For Elizabeth, as a D&R employee, the situation left an even more bitter taste.

  “I don’t think I can honestly express how bad that was,” she groans. “Pitted right next to Will, I had my radio on, and was watching Ana’s stop. There was something wrong with her car so it took extra long. When it was fixed, poor Robbie [Buhl, team co-owner who called Beatriz’s strategy] saw Will coming and said, ‘No, no, no!’ but unfortunately Ana heard it as what she’d normally hear – ‘Go, go, go!’ Well, when I saw her go-go-going, I knew it wasn’t going to be good, and I could only watch her slice Will’s sidepod open. I realized it was going to be massively costly and I admit, I started bawling. For the first time in the IRL era, Will had the best car on an oval, and by a big margin. He was totally in a league of his own that day and it had ended in disaster.”

  True. But the word “disaster” was about to be redefined for all of IndyCar’s participants.

  Chapter 17

  Lessons learned too late

  What a pretty sight they made, glittering under the multicolored lights of Vegas. Thirty-four IndyCars spluttered and revved their way from the fountains outside the Bellagio hotel to blast along a stretch of South Las Vegas Boulevard, between Tropicana Avenue and Flamingo Road. It was Thursday evening, 13 October 2011 and the atmosphere was positive. Here was a promotional idea that only IndyCar CEO Randy Bernard could have pulled off, since the Vegas strip rarely closes for anything. Who knew if it would put any more people on the gate at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, fifteen miles up the road, where the IndyCar Series season finale would be held? It was worth a try and it brought IndyCar some attention on TV, websites and in print media.

  Why thirty-four cars rather than the usual twenty-four or so? Well, it was the final race for the old Dallara IndyCar, so there were several one-off entries in the field, much as you’d find in the Indy 500 – oval specialists, oldies, newbies and chancers. And speaking of the world’s most famous race, that year’s winner, Dan Wheldon would be taking part. He’d started only one event since capturing the sport’s biggest prize back in May, but in the intervening period he had been IndyCar’s designated tester for the all-new turbocharged Dallara that would become the series’ spec car in 2012. Here in Vegas, Wheldon would be starting from the back of the grid in a Sam Schmidt Motorsports car and were he to win, he’d earn US$5 million from IndyCar, which he’d split with a (very) lucky, randomly selected fan.

  Originally that prize had been offered to any non-IndyCar drivers who felt ready for the challenge of taking on the fastest racers in North America, and Randy Bernard had hoped to attract Formula 1/ex-F1/NASCAR stars. However schedule and sponsor conflicts had taken any potential big names out of the equation. By switching the US$5 million prize to Wheldon, IndyCar’s dollars looked more at risk: many believed winning this race at LVMS, even starting from the back, was well within Dan’s grasp.

  And somewhere in this mix, jostling for publicity alongside Wheldon’s run for the big money, was the duel for the big prize. The IndyCar Series title would be decided between three-time champion Dario Franchitti of Chip Ganassi Racing, and Team Penske’s Will Power who was 18 points behind following the Kentucky pit lane foul-up. Yet here in Vegas these sworn rivals would qualify only mid-grid, in seventeenth and eighteenth, and it seemed their bigger concern was the nature of the track and the racing that was to come. LVMS had been reconfigured six years earlier, with its corner banking raised to 20 degrees, the purpose being to allow more side-by-side racing for the venue’s most successful events (NASCAR). Unfortunately but inevitably, this had created a similar effect for 220 mph IndyCars, and they were pinned to the track surface by centrifugal force.

  “It’s just a giant dyno test for the engines,” sneered Power after final practice. “We’re easy flat out all the way around. The cars can be driven anywhere on the track, and even running in dirty air doesn’t affect them. This is going to be a pack race like on any other 1.5-mile oval, but this time we’ll have an extra ten cars.” He shook his head, his eyes widened. “Intense,” he concluded.

  Indeed it was, for the ten laps it lasted. Then, somewhere near the front, James Hinchcliffe of Newman/Haas Racing and one of the race’s “one-offs”, 2005 Indy Lights champion Wade Cunningham, touched at 220 mph. Once Cunningham spun, it triggered a chain reaction of accidents in which fifteen cars were eliminated and Wheldon was killed when his car flew into the catch fencing and his helmet struck one of the fence support poles. In the most dreadful manner imaginable, the Indy 500 winner of 2005 and 2011 and the 2005 IndyCar Series champion had perished at the age of thirty-three. Dan’s cheeky, winsome charisma is still missed by his friends and fans, and by the series as a whole.

  Power recounts IndyCar’s dark weekend.

  “No one in the paddock wanted to do it, from what I remember,” he says. “Even before races at the other 1.5-milers, we’d say things like, ‘This is going to be intense’. Not, ‘This is going to be fun’, not ‘This is going to be hard work.’ No, we just hoped we’d get out the other side. But in Vegas it was worse because it was so banked and the surface was so grippy that you could just sit there on someone’s gearbox with no aero wash. We were glued and so there was no separation. If they had the exact same cars, the least talented driver could have raced with the most talented.

  “Then we had a public drivers’ meeting. At Indy, we have a real one and then the public one as part of the Saturday attraction, but at Vegas, there was just the public one, so we didn’t feel we could voice our opinions. We couldn’t stick our hands up and say, ‘This is crazy, let’s take downforce off.’ I mean, look at those ingredients and tell me that wasn’t a recipe for absolute disaster.

  “Dario and I didn’t agree about much in those days, but I remember us in a press conference before the race where we were supposed to be talking about the championship fight, and we couldn’t even play psychological games with each other by pretending we were excited. There was none of this, ‘Yeah, this is gonna be great!’ to put the other one under pressure. I remember just sitting there thinking, ‘Christ, all that effort racing each other all year has come down to this lottery for lunatics.’

  “Tim Cindric admitted to me afterward that for the first few laps of the race he stopped thinking about strategy; he was just caught up in watching this spectacle where no one could pull away. It was just thirty-four open-wheel cars flat out, three or four-wide, like NASCAR at Talladega or Daytona but now for faster and open-wheel cars.

  “I dropped back a few laps in because I figured it was a long race, and I could see some crazy movements up ahead, and I didn’t want to be a part of that. Dan went around the outside of me and I saw him make up a few more places. Then I saw a puff of smoke and I thought, ‘Shit, someone’s going to crash,’ but actually it was people just touching wheels. And there were other people moving around like maniacs because, like I say, we were so glued a driver could get away with anything.

  “Then on Lap 11, I saw another puff – that was between Cunningham and Hinchcliffe – so I cracked the throttle, but then there was nothing for a moment, because Cunningham took a while to lose it. But when he went up the track, suddenly there was a lot more smoke. JR Hildebrand got up on someone who’d backed off a lot, and suddenly the smoke multiplied and cars started going everywhere. It just kept getting worse and worse and worse. I was behind Alex Lloyd but I could see most of the spinning cars were at the top of the track, and then gradually coming back down the banking after hitting the wall. So I’m getting back on the throttle to duck low and escape the carnage, but Lloyd must have seen Wheldon and EJ Viso getting together so he lifted and I hit his rear wheel and just took off.

  “I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to the catchfence,’ which of course is your worst nightmare but then while the car was flying in the air, the rear touched down on the banked pavement and I landed on top of Hildebrand’s car. As I was coming to a stop, a car slid past me backwards and stopped beside me with my nose facing the right-
hand side of his cockpit. All the crashed cars stopped moving and there beside me but facing me was a driver with his visor hanging off his helmet and it was obvious his helmet had hit something solid. His eyes were open but the look on his face and the damage done . . .

  “That shunt was too bad, I just knew someone had died. If you think how lucky we’d been so many times with those pack races, to then have half the field crash out at 220 mph, the odds were against us. I could tell the hard landing had fractured my back because I now knew the feeling, but I was thinking, ‘Someone’s died, and all I know is that it isn’t me.’

  “I decided to stay in the car because I was scared to move my back, but that meant I was still looking at Dan. It was horrible. The IndyCar Safety Team arrived and I could tell it was the direst kind of emergency, because they’re normally very, very careful about extractions, but they just started ripping Dan out of the car to get him out as soon as possible so they could care for him.

  “Then Paul Tracy came over to me and said, ‘Your car’s on fire, get out!’ and him and Townsend Bell took my cockpit surround off, so I could struggle up and out. We were just sitting on the wall there and I said to them, ‘Whoever was in that car is dead.’ Then we got in the Medical Car, and I was yelling – partly in pain, partly in anger over this stupid race. PT was saying, ‘I know, man, I know, but just calm down.’

  “Then in the Medical Center it was just terrible because Dan was brought in on the gurney, and there was blood pooling on the floor so I deliberately turned away to avoid it. I was just looking at Paul but he could see past me and he said, ‘Shit, don’t turn, you don’t want to see that,’ and he was right. The image of Dan’s face as we sat beside each other on track was enough and it will stay with me forever.

  “I knew the medical team needed to focus on Dan, and although I’d broken my back, I couldn’t stay in the Medical Center. A doctor cleared me to come back later, so I walked out in a lot of pain, and there was Liz crying because she didn’t know how I was, didn’t know the state of anyone, didn’t know who’d been hurt, and so on. We were both upset and in shock, so Derrick and PT pushed us into an open bathroom so we could talk, because Susie, Dan’s wife, was sitting out there. I said to them, ‘I think Wheldon’s dead.’ We then got our wits about us, left Medical and got on a golf-cart back to the Penske transporters to wait, because I was in too much pain to walk.

  “Once Dan had been transported, I went back to Medical and they said I needed to go to the hospital, so they strapped me to a stretcher, loaded me into an ambulance, Liz got in the front and we headed to the hospital for X-rays. When I got there, I asked IndyCar’s nurse, Denise Titus, ‘How’s Dan?’ and she just choked up and had to walk away, so it was Liz who told me, ‘Dan didn’t make it.’ Ugh . . . man. I wanted to just get up and walk around and yell and kick something or whatever, but they wouldn’t let me move until I got an X-ray.

  “Anyway, finally I get that done, so me and Liz walk down to the elevator and get in, and there’s Dan’s wife, Susie, and his sister, Holly. I don’t know what to say. They are just so distraught and destroyed and in the worst state you can imagine. Completely traumatized. All I could think of to say was, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Susie sobbed, ‘Dan loved racing you guys.’”

  “I think the recovery period for me, physically, was about four weeks. But mentally . . . I don’t know, man. I just kept watching those replays again and again, trying to understand. And then I’d just sit thinking about Wheldon. It’s not like we’d been close friends like he was with Dario, TK and Dixon – he’d been one of the old IRL Andretti Green gang with Dario and TK, and I wasn’t part of that scene at all. Just before that race, circumstance had brought us together, because the promotion had been about how Dario and I were fighting for the championship and Dan was going for the US$5 million. He was good behind the microphone – he’d been doing TV commentaries for a lot of the races that year – so at the promotional events for Vegas, he’d be interviewing me and Dario on stage, and we’d be doing autograph sessions together and so on. And now suddenly he was gone.

  “I think it’s a weird coincidence that Dan died doing the thing that had earned him all the praise – the pack racing that he was so good at because he was so brave and wouldn’t be intimidated. The last race of that old IRL-era oval racing killed one of the best at that type of racing. That chapter was closed with the worst ending possible. Unbelievable.

  “I was amazed to hear later that among the nineteen drivers not taken out in that accident, there were some who wanted to restart. That blows me away. It’s not like the situation had improved, except the number of cars had been reduced. The nature of the track was still the same; the principles were still the same; the physics were still the same. You can’t know 100 per cent for sure until you’re put in that situation, but I’m pretty certain that even if I hadn’t been caught up in the accident and Dario had – so all I needed to do was finish to beat him to the championship – I’d have said, ‘No way. We just eliminated fifteen cars and killed a guy. Let’s end this shit now.’

  “I had preached it for so long how stupid and dangerous that formula was. I mean, we’d had enough warnings – Kenny Bräck, Davey Hamilton, Ryan Briscoe, and all those other near-misses. Dario had also had a couple of enormous escapes in 2007. But it took someone dying for us drivers to be taken seriously once we had the DW12 and demanded that downforce was taken away on the ovals so we actually had to drive them again.

  “The series will always have to monitor this situation. You can’t leave it to the drivers and say to them, ‘Take care of each other out there.’ That’s bullshit. We are paid to win so we’ll do whatever it takes to win, and if that means go four-wide one inch apart, that’s what we’re gonna do. Well if you’re in that close proximity for laps on end, the chances of something going wrong and it having massive consequences is multiplied.”

  “I can’t even remember how I felt about missing out on the championship,” says Power in a dismissive manner, as if that was a triviality. “I think I knew after Kentucky that we were screwed. You don’t give away an easy advantage to Dario and the Ganassi team like we did that day and still expect to win. In the end, it was a lottery in Vegas and I’ve never won at gambling. But anyway, that weekend everybody lost. We lost Dan.”

  For Tim Cindric and Roger Penske, too, the missed chance of a title was an afterthought. Four years on, Penske doesn’t want to go into details, even when pushed.

  “That was just a terrible accident,” he says, “and we all miss Dan very much. We were thankful that there weren’t more injuries in that incident and we continue to think about Dan’s family.”

  Cindric adds: “The championship was the furthest thing from any of our minds as we left Vegas that night. Will had a sense of relief that he’d survived, and watching his onboard from the accident, you’re just totally amazed that he escaped. But the fact that Dan’s car stopped right in his line of sight, facing him – that was a hard thing to deal with mentally. You imagine: realizing you’ve just escaped and now seeing a fellow competitor who’s very obviously had a different fate. It’s difficult for anyone to get over that, and I’d say that was an unspoken thing for us within the team over the next year, maybe more. I don’t know if there would have been any use talking about it. It was just something that Will had to get through.”

  Physically, Power played down the pain, but it was obvious to Elizabeth that things weren’t right. “Will voluntarily put on his old back brace when we got home,” she says, “and that day I got a call from Dr Trammell. He said: ‘I can’t confirm because I haven’t seen the scans yet, but I’m pretty positive Will broke his back again. I’ve seen the data, and he got a 200G vertical spike. There’s no way he didn’t break his back.’ Can you imagine? When he broke his back at Sonoma in 2009, it was an 88G spike and he broke four vertebrae. So Trammell insisted Will have an MRI scan and sure enough, he’d fractured T4 and T5 again . . .”

  This time, recovery was swift,
and Will was testing the new car – renamed DW12 in honor of its principal test driver – four weeks later. But the psychological after-effects endured well into the 2012 season and they ran deep.

  Chapter 18

  Don’t dream it’s over

  This wasn’t good. Early hours of the morning and again he couldn’t sleep. And this was Will Power who, in order to function properly, needs sleep like a combustion engine needs oil. This was the umpteenth consecutive night like this, a self-generating muddle of sleep patterns that contained little sleep and no pattern. Weariness, lethargy, but no rest.

  Instead of an alarm clock, the mournful chime keeping Will awake through the fall of 2011 was the sad echo of a bell that’s tolled ever since this inherently perilous sport began. Its star performers pursue their hobby-turned-passion-turned-profession and form a silent contract with Fate that acknowledges the dangers and their consequences. Like most personal contracts, this one’s rarely examined, especially now that racing is so much safer than it was fifty or a hundred years ago. But that’s why fatalities hit harder in the twenty-first century than ever before.

  Yet the reaction from a victim’s peers, friends and rivals is the same as it ever was. They mourn the loss, they pay tribute, they recite the false-comfort phrase that their fallen colleague “died doing what he/she loved.” Afterward they may make calls for changes in the name of safety – cars, tracks, medical facilities, procedures, whatever. But racecar drivers ultimately realize they cannot be prepared for everything, that they are in the lap of the gods for much of the time, and so they go right back to doing what they do naturally – which is the exact same thing as before. That’s not foolishness: they’re just conditioned that way, at least while the helmet’s on and they’re doing their job.