Away from the track, it’s a different story. The thirty-three IndyCar drivers who left Las Vegas Motor Speedway alive on 16 October 2011, all knew that what had happened to Dan Wheldon could have happened to any one of them. The race had contained all the ingredients that could induce a crash and turn a crash into a catastrophe – that much was almost predictable. By contrast, the identity of who’d be hurt most seemed callously random and a lot of drivers were deeply troubled by that. Wheldon had been doing nothing out of the ordinary in those extraordinary circumstances, yet had paid the ultimate price. Over the next couple of weeks, Paul Tracy, Townsend Bell and Will Power – the guys who’d seen the worst of the appalling aftermath – provided group therapy for each other by phone. It helped, to the extent that Will eventually weaned himself off watching replays of the crash, and puzzling over the chain reaction and the physics involved. But the mood in the Power household remained dark.
“About four weeks after the accident, my back was healed enough so that I was cleared to get back in a racecar,” says Will. “That was my second test of the [new Dallara] DW12, but I hadn’t been sleeping and so I wasn’t myself. I don’t know how much preparation I did for the test. All I remember doing before that was spending my days down in the basement, watching depressing TV.”
“It’s hard to describe,” says Elizabeth, “but the effect that crash had on Will was something my family all noticed when we went to Dallas for Thanksgiving. They were really concerned because all of a sudden he seemed to have this ‘don’t care’ attitude, which is very noticeable in someone like Will, because he’s normally so conscientious and on it. Then he went to Australia for Christmas, and things started turning around a bit after that, but he still had these ups and downs through the first half of 2012 . . . and beyond that, actually.”
Will says: “The big turnaround was Toronto [the tenth round of the season], because I finally got to speak to Holly Wheldon. I’d been wanting to speak to her for so long and I just didn’t know how or when or what to say. I kept thinking, ‘Should I get her number and call? Mmmm . . . I don’t think so because she and the family are going through the grieving process.’ I mean . . . think about it: Dan died in the prime of life, his early thirties, so that’s even more terrible for the people left behind, because it’s so unexpected. Completely devastating. So I didn’t know when would be a good time to call, because I hadn’t been as good friends with Dan as [Tony] Kanaan and [Dario] Franchitti had been.
“Anyway, in Toronto, I was walking back to the paddock after a practice session and suddenly I spotted Holly. I didn’t think twice – I went over straight away and said, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’ and gave her a hug. And then suddenly I didn’t have a chance to worry about talking to her; I just started talking. I told her how much Dan’s death had affected me.”
But Toronto was the tenth round of a fifteen-race season and, up to that point, it had been a strange year for Power. “Yeah,” he says slowly, nodding. “Until then, there had been some good stuff and some shitty, weird stuff. And actually that kinda pattern kept going for a while . . .”
The all-new Dallara DW12 chassis for 2012 had been built to house a small-capacity (2.2-liter) V6 turbo engine, and this had attracted three manufacturers for 2012 – series incumbents Honda, along with Chevrolet and Lotus (although the grossly underpowered Lotus disappeared from all but one of the cars long before the midway point of the season). Roger Penske had been instrumental in enticing Chevrolet back to the sport and Andretti also went with the Bowtie engines, which had been built by Ilmor. Meanwhile Honda Performance Development in California became builders of the Japanese brand’s unit, and Chip Ganassi Racing would inevitably prove the best of the teams with HPD power.
It was the nature of the chassis that made Power wary, despite it being a clear step forward in the safety department. New regs and a new car had given IndyCar the chance to pull a tight rein on in-team development, so DW12 was far more “spec” than its predecessor, with few areas left open to tax a team’s R&D brainpower. IndyCar’s intention was to level the playing field between the haves and have-nots, which was perhaps a worthy cause. But it also meant there was far less capacity for race engineers to tweak and tune a car’s handling according to a driver’s wishes – and the new car’s in-built characteristics weren’t Power-friendly.
“The chassis of the old IRL car was quite interesting,” says Will, “because it had been created when there was still chassis competition, so it had been pretty thoroughly developed and built for speed, which is something you don’t get with a truly spec car. Weight distribution was good – not much weight beyond the centerline of each axle. Plus, it was originally designed to do a mainly oval championship, so the road course kit was a bit of an afterthought. It probably had 1000 to 1500 pounds less downforce than the DW12, so it moved around a lot more, and that was fun. I did like it, because its low front wing made it pitch-sensitive and quite positive on corner entry, whereas the DW12 had a kind of numb-feeling understeer.”
Says Dave Faustino: “By the end of preseason testing, we realized we weren’t going to be able to make this new car feel like Will ideally wanted on road and street courses. I mean, if you had to take a kit of parts off the shelf and have Will design a racecar according to his wishes, what he’d come up with would be a hell of a long way from a Dallara DW12. And with so little of it left open for us to adjust, even though we had smart people working for us, a lot of our strengths were taken away.
“But once Will realized he couldn’t drive this thing loose or on the edge of balance, and that he’d have to relearn new techniques, he still went out and got more poles and led more laps than anyone that season. He was just so committed to being quick in whatever he had to drive. That was impressive.”
And initially, so were the results. After a strategy-induced stumble in the opening round at St Petersburg, Power won the next three races on the bounce, the first time he’d done that in ten years. Startlingly, two of these victories came from mid-pack at tracks infamous for their lack of passing opportunities. The first of these was at Barber Motorsports Park, where he was robbed of the chance to take pole when, in the second portion of qualifying, a red flag was brought out for an on-track incident, and Will’s fast time was deleted, despite already being past the accident scene. He’d start ninth.
“That is still one of my favorite wins, a real team win where everyone played a massive part,” says Power enthusiastically. “We decided to go for three stops instead of two, so Tim Cindric’s aim was to keep me in clean air on a clear track and allow me to drive really hard and make up ground from ninth. So that’s what we did – flat out, stop early, flat out, stop early again. In that race, the tires degraded a lot but because I was committed to three stops, I was always on fresher tires than the guys around me. Just before the final stop, I was catching Scott Dixon, who was leading, and Tim called me in really late – just after Dixon went past pit entry but just in time to get me in. Teams monitor each other’s radios, so if Ganassi had known I was about to pit, they’d have pitted Dixon at the same time and we’d have gone out still with him in front. But because of the tire degradation, a driver’s out-laps were faster than his in-laps, even with a full fuel load and cold tires. Dixon had figured this out too, because apparently he radioed to Ganassi, ‘Power just pitted, didn’t he?’ and they said ‘Yeah’ and he said, ‘He got us.’ I was now on a clear track with fresh tires and able to pump out fast laps and so when he made his final stop, I was a few seconds up the road and he had no chance of passing. So . . . yup, that was a good one that allowed me to do what I had to do, the pit crew were absolutely on it, and Tim got the strategy perfect.”
At Long Beach, Will was legitimately outqualified on a road/street course by a teammate (Ryan Briscoe) for only the second time since he joined Penske, but it mattered less to him than might usually be the case. In order to keep costs down and prevent engine development getting out of control, IndyCar had set a minimum mileage li
mit of 2000 miles, and any car that required a new engine ahead of that schedule would be penalized ten places on the grid. When Chevrolet was forced to change a part (for the sake of reliability) on all its units, Briscoe and Power found themselves dumped from the front row to the sixth and Chevy’s chance of winning IndyCar’s second-biggest race of the year looked remote. Yet thanks to Power’s absurd ability to save fuel while also going as fast as his rivals, he was able to make race distance on only two pit stops and hold off his former teammate Simon Pagenaud’s Schmidt Peterson Motorsport car to the checkered flag.
Will’s third win came in his happy hunting ground, the streets of Sao Paulo. But the next race, the Indianapolis 500, was a disaster. Power had misgivings from the start of practice. Once everyone had driven the new car’s superspeedway package and tried out its behavior in the slipstream of other cars, they discovered the DW12’s body punched a bigger hole in the air, so everyone was getting towed along in each other’s wake and no one could get away.
“I hated Indy that year,” admits Power. “The new car had sorted all the other ovals out, made them into proper driver tracks with separation between the cars. But Indy had been turned into something of a pack race where you could not get away, even if you were faster. This was our first oval race since Dan died, and it wasn’t good.”
Liz shared her husband’s trepidation. After embracing Will before the start of the race, she turned to her mother and said tearfully, “Will just hugged me like it would be his last time we’d ever see each other.”
“Well, she read me well,” growls Power. “That’s exactly the mentality I took into that race, which is pretty bad, but that’s how I felt. Actually, we were having a reasonable race that day; the Hondas were faster but we were doing okay, but then Mike Conway’s [AJ Foyt Racing] car had its wing collapse and he spun in front of me, I collected him and it was all over.”
A top-ten finish that afternoon would have been enough to win Power the title that year, but there were so many if-only moments that season, it would be wrong to pin down his eventual loss to one race or one instance. Will made mistakes too – a drive-through penalty for blocking Tony Kanaan at Texas Motor Speedway, when he appeared to have the race in his pocket; turning down on Viso at Iowa, leading to a crash; making a bad situation worse at Toronto, where he was hosed by a caution period but then broke his front wing on rookie Josef Newgarden’s car.
There were days of brilliance too, climbing from seventeenth to finish third at Edmonton without the aid of a single caution period being one obvious example. But the final three races would define the championship. After leading the race at Sonoma by thirteen seconds, Power was annoyed to get caught behind a dawdling backmarker under yellow, just as teammate Briscoe pitted. The result was that Ryan emerged ahead and held that advantage to the checkered flag. In light of what happened at season’s end, that could be considered a pivotal moment in the championship battle which had boiled down to Power/Penske versus Ryan Hunter-Reay/Andretti Autosport. The American had put together a three-wins-in-a row sequence mid-season, and was taking advantage of Will’s misfortunes.
So should Team Penske have issued team orders at Sonoma to put Power in front after circumstances robbed him of the lead? It’s eminently debatable, but, the fact is, that just isn’t the Penske way.
“There are a lot of teams that would have orchestrated that but Penske’s never really been one of them,” says Cindric. “If we’d been talking about anything other than first place, then maybe we’d have asked Briscoe to drop back. But this was a guy who hadn’t won for two years and is therefore thinking he’s driving for his own ride. In those circumstances, I wouldn’t have expected Ryan to move over voluntarily and it would have been an extraordinary ask on our part. So I don’t blame Ryan.”
Roger Penske was strongly disinclined – and he’s the boss. “We have always said that when one of our drivers wins, the whole team wins and that is the case no matter the circumstances,” he says. “We let our drivers race and the results will take care of themselves. If you start making calls for guys to move positions when everyone is fighting for a win, you never know what can happen so we have found it best to just let the drivers race to determine who comes out on top.”
Power still kicks himself for not doing precisely that – resolving it himself by making the pass on track. “I was an idiot because I kept hitting the pit lane speed limiter because I was putting so much aggression into the wheel. I was saying to myself, ‘Okay, you’ve got him this time,’ and I was about to get a good run on him inside and then ‘brrrrrr’ – the engine tries to die because I’m now at a low enough speed that hitting the pit speed limiter button triggers it. So I was gutted because I had that race in my pocket until the yellow and then caught a slow guy at precisely the wrong moment. And then not making a pass – that was down to me.
“But, honestly, my biggest regret is not talking about that possibility as a team before the race. I think we should have got in a huddle and said, ‘Look, Power’s going for the championship so to maximize our team chances, if you other two are ahead of him for whatever reason, give up the place.’ I couldn’t honestly blame Ryan because he was feeling the heat – he was on the verge of losing that ride – and I also understand that Roger had sponsors on that car who wanted a trip to Victory Lane. But – and I know some people might not believe me – I think I would have at least come over the radio and asked the team, ‘What do you want me to do?’”
“Still . . . that’s Penske: they expect a driver to be loyal and give up a place but not a win. I just felt that having lost championships in the final rounds for the previous four years, maybe an exception could have been made. But obviously I’m biased!”
So too is Liz. “Okay, I get it that Briscoe was feeling the pressure and needed to win, but I think he should have been a true teammate and pulled over, because it was Will who’d earned the win. I still look back at Toronto in 2009, when Will was a part-timer who desperately needed to prove himself and yet he came over the radio to tell the team to tell Ryan not to worry and he voluntarily backed up the pack on the final restart, and settled for third, to allow Ryan a clear run at Dario, because they were fighting for the championship. Three years later, I think Ryan should have returned the favor.”
Maybe, just maybe, the Penske team might have altered its standard team-order protocol that day had Power been several points behind Hunter-Reay. Instead, despite finishing second rather than first, Will left Sonoma with a handy 36-point lead in the championship with two rounds to go, and when he qualified on pole at Baltimore with Hunter-Reay only tenth on the grid, many supposedly shrewd observers were prepared to “give” the title to Will at that stage. But on race day, rain and a series of yellow-flag periods jumbled the strategy and the order and Andretti Autosport owner Michael Andretti took a brave gamble on behalf of his lead driver, who then drove masterfully to victory. Power accepts that, but won’t accept Race Control’s decision to not wave off the final restart, which Hunter-Reay appeared to jump. “That was bullshit, I don’t care what anyone says.”
And so with his points lead pegged back to seventeen, Will headed to Fontana semi-optimistic the third time would be a charm.
“I had a car easily capable of beating Hunter-Reay that night, but when we both took an engine-change penalty and started near the back, I should have just stuck behind him and never tried to pass. But we overreacted to how slow Ryan was going compared with the leaders, and because we had a long stretch of green-flag running, the team was worried I was going to get lapped. Well, we should have just let that happen because if I got lapped, it didn’t matter because so would Ryan as he was just a second in front of me and struggling with his car.
“Anyway, I responded to the team’s advice and went to pass him. I dropped my left front wheel below the seam on the track, which put my left-rear wheel directly on the seam. It unsettled the car and sent the rear around. It was such a weird spin that I’d like to think something brok
e, but I’m pretty sure it was my mistake. No excuses. Funny thing is, talk about experience: if that had happened in practice, I guarantee you it would have been a different story because I’d have learned from that. As it happened, it was Ryan who shunted in practice, me who lost it when it mattered.”
“Can you believe that, at Fontana, the TV guys wanted to put a mic on me for the race?!” says Liz. “Me – the nervous wreck! Heck no! As it is, though, they made me infamous for fifteen minutes because their cameras caught my reaction to Will’s crash. Even when we went down to Australia when Will was doing the V8 Supercar race at Surfers Paradise with Mark Winterbottom, they kept showing replays of me when Will crashed. Of course I had to be dropping the F-bomb. Great . . .
“Going into Fontana, Will had felt reasonably confident because the car had felt good in the test, but things faltered a little bit during practice, because it didn’t feel anything special at all and Tim and Dave’s confidence dropped too. At that point on an oval, Will had to feel the car secure or at least predictable, like it was for him at Texas where he was fastest. He didn’t feel that in Fontana, so Will was going to be quite happy to just sit behind Ryan Hunter-Reay.”
Faustino agrees. “We could have made our car good by the end of the night. It’s just that we weren’t there. We were too hasty. We could have ridden around behind Hunter-Reay all night, but Hildebrand [leader] was coming around and was going to lap us within ten laps . . .”
“I just wanted Will to run his own race rather than go a lap down,” remembers Cindric, “because if you run too conservative, sometimes that’s when you make mistakes and we didn’t want to overthink it. We had a much better car than Ryan, so I told Will, ‘If you can pass him, pass him.’ I don’t think Will was running ten-tenths and lost it; I don’t think we pushed him harder than he felt comfortable with. I look at it simply as him being caught out by a seam.”
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 25