It was tough. The Penske team rebuilt the No. 12 car as best they could, and when other cars broke down Will was sent out to make up some more places, gain more points and make it tougher on Hunter-Reay, to force him to finish higher. But as Faustino expected to do with Will’s car, RHR’s engineer Ray Gosselin steadily improved the Andretti Autosport machine over the course of the evening, and Ryan claimed the spots he needed and won the championship. In the meantime, Will had changed into civvies – black polo shirt and pants – and went and congratulated the 2012 IndyCar Series champion, a driver he had always respected, even when others had not. Then he went home and brooded over his third straight loss in a championship duel.
“He took a real knock,” remembers mother-in-law Kathy Cannon. “It was a real blow to his confidence and the way he talked about it in private – to Lizzy and myself – seemed to suggest he didn’t think he could ever do it. We tried to reassure him that it wasn’t all his doing, but that winter he lost something, no doubt about it. Plus, it didn’t help that he’d crashed at Fontana: I think he started to believe the fans and the media that he wasn’t good enough on ovals.”
Rick Mears had no such qualms. “As well as his talent and his work ethic, what convinced me that one day Will would be good on ovals was the way he handled himself on a road course. I saw the procedures he’d go through after a qualifying run, where he’d come in, find where he could still gain, then go out and run even quicker by applying what he’d learned. He’d be picking up the pieces he left on the table before but without dropping any of the other pieces . . . That’s one of the hardest things a racecar driver does, because it’s all about the tiny margins and minute adjustments here and there. Well that’s exactly what oval racing is about – massaging the car, fine-tuning your line, and so on. So if he could do it on road courses, I had total belief that he had the tools to be good on ovals as well. The last thing that needed to click for him was confidence, self-belief.”
Convincing Mr Power that he’s good enough is harder than going out and doing it yourself, however. And under his little cloud of depression, he had his motivation dented, too, as Team Penske finally let go of Briscoe during the winter of 2012.
“I was a bit sad about that,” says Will. “Ryan always had the potential to win races and that had really kept me on my toes because I appreciate tough teammates – they’re a big motivator for me. So, subconsciously, maybe I relaxed a bit, although I don’t remember it that way. But if I did, yeah, that would hurt my performances because you can’t afford to give up even fractions.”
Liz agrees the absence of Briscoe hurt Will mentally. “The Australian rivalry had been a motivating factor for both of them. Will wanted to be the first Australian to win an Indy car championship, and the first to win the Indy 500, and Ryan was his biggest competition for both. Plus Ryan had been a Formula 1 test driver and was highly regarded in Australia so Will was always out to prove a point. So after that winter of being so despondent about losing the championship three years in a row, and then also seeing Ryan go, I think the early setbacks he had in the 2013 season hurt him more than if he’d been on a roll.”
Setbacks such as . . . ? Well, having a lapped driver use Power’s car as a launch ramp as the pack cruised at 50 mph behind the pace car in St Petersburg. You’d think Will had done the hard bit – taking pole and leading early on until bumped down to third on a restart. But no, apparently he was now supposed to check his mirrors for incoming backmarkers while the field was under caution. Who knew? Long Beach was another race he could have finished strongly, but a car ran into him on pit lane and the engine stalled, dropping him to the back of the field. But the one that still aggravates Will to this day was the start of what could have been an epic win in Brazil, the track where he’d won the three previous years. Power and Castroneves had to start near the back, having not set a flying lap by the time red flags flew for a crash that effectively ended the session early. Yet on race day, Power looked like he could be in the lead long before half-distance, even without the aid of a full-course caution.
“I had the wings trimmed out to make us fast in a straight line, and I got into this cycle of passing a car per lap, without even touching the push-to-pass boost. It was phenomenal. We were going to hit the front and then disappear, I had no doubts. Of all the races to have a mechanical problem, it couldn’t be one where our setup sucked: no, this weird little one-off problem [engine heat melted a wiring loom] had to be one where we were set to dominate, even from twenty-second on the grid. I couldn’t believe it.”
There were times when he just had to laugh at how ridiculous his luck had turned, but that was to the media. In private, Power was worried that he was doing something wrong. The very same character trait that had won over so many engineers – the fact that he looked inwardly to make himself faster, rather than assuming it was the car at fault – was the trait that now spiraled his confidence downward.
“He kept saying, ‘What am I not doing that I used to do?’” recalls Kathy. “He didn’t want to put it down to bad luck. He felt like he was slipping. So I went on Google and found these stories about athletes and sports figures who have down seasons, and are forced to accept that they can’t be at their peak all the time. And what these stories all had in common were things like, ‘The important thing is not to doubt yourself, but keep doing what you need to do and it will come good again.’ Well forget it! Will didn’t want to know. He was trying to look at it completely logically – ‘If things are going wrong, what is the source of them going wrong?’ And of course in Will’s case, his default is to assume he’s the source of the problem!”
“Mom’s right, absolutely,” says Liz. “When Will had that mechanical at Brazil, that was like the one-year anniversary since his last win, and oh my goodness, it was depressing between races because people kept pointing out that statistic. And his problems did keep on going. I mean, I hated seeing him so gloomy but I totally sympathized with him because it really did seem that no matter how hard he tried, he got nothing in return in the way of results.”
Certainly not from the media. There is a trend rife among old-school sports writers and commentators to use points tables and trophy counts alone when analyzing the season of a team or an athlete – results rather than the circumstances behind those results define their opinion, which they then share persuasively with their readers or listeners. And yet, ironically, it was venerable sportscaster Vin Scully, the play-by-play announcer for the LA Dodgers baseball team, who once pointed out the foolishness of those who rely too heavily on the numbers. Quoting Scottish poet Andrew Lang, Scully remarked: “Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, not illumination.”
Well said, Vin, well said . . . although it’s a debate as to whether these data devotees were more or less annoying than the journalists who tried masquerading as psychologists in this period, and wondered out loud whether Power was a spent force. One man who’d snort with derision at such a suggestion was Tim Cindric.
“I was never worried about Will psychologically during this period, because of his speed,” he says. “He hadn’t slipped from that top level at all. Being in his pit every session and being in every debrief and seeing him at work, I understood that nothing had really changed. He just had a lot of bad circumstances one on top of the other – that’s why he was missing out. Who gets run over under yellow at St Pete? That just doesn’t happen every day, so at least we could sit there and think, ‘Okay, we got that out of the way – that could never happen again!’ And then the Brazil engine failure – never happened before or since, I don’t think. So, no, I never lost faith, never lost confidence that a race would eventually just play out in a normal manner for him, which is all it would take to see him back in Victory Lane eventually.”
It took until the eighth round of the year for Power to even score his first podium, at Milwaukee, where he dueled with teammate Castroneves for second place, until being reminded that Helio was leading the cham
pionship and therefore Will should think twice about trying anything risky. Two races later, he was fourth at Pocono. “That was good because I hated looking like a wanker on the ovals,” he says. “At Texas I was only seventh – when Helio won – and at Iowa, a part broke on my car and its handling turned evil and I just dropped like a rock.”
If there was one man just as frustrated with the lack of results as Power, it was Faustino. He confesses he did see a change in Will over the first half of the season, and it wasn’t helpful.
“Having come so close to the title for three straight years, the mental pressure keeps building – it’s not like it’s going to get easier! And so as each crazy thing happened to him to stop him winning in 2013, even small things started to have a disproportionately severe effect on him. Trying to get him to talk constructively and focus was a real struggle. And, to be honest, I was feeling it too: having the president of the team on our timing stand, I was allowing that pressure to get to me, so I wasn’t giving as good as I could to Will.
“So we had a long discussion, a sort of bonding thing, and just made this solid commitment to each other to stay focused, and just go out and do what we do. We had some midsummer testing that year, and we went back to basics and started trying to find things that would work for him and improve the car. It was a couple of days of pure, solid work and I think we left that test feeling more positive than we’d felt in a long time. It just renewed our confidence in each other that we would just keep on focusing on improvement.”
It led to another moment that changed Power’s outlook on the season.
“At Toronto, which was a double-header race, I decided that if I didn’t win the first race, I doubted there was any chance of me getting back into championship contention. Well, that race ended with me in the tires, because the race got restarted with just one lap to go, and I tried a 50/50 maneuver – maybe not even that good a percentage, now I think about it! – down the inside of Franchitti at Turn 3, and skidded straight on. So that decided me: I went to Roger and told him, ‘Look, I think it’s time for me to help Helio try and win this championship.’ Liz was mad at me for doing that with seven races still to go, but . . . I was just trying to be realistic. And the next day, Race 2, me and Hunter-Reay got tangled with two laps to go.”
It may not have earned him brownie points with his wife, but his team boss was pleased and impressed with Will’s decision.
“That was just a demonstration of how committed Will is to our team and our pursuit of the championship,” says Roger Penske. “Anyone who knows Will knows that he is always driven to win – that’s just how he races. So to be willing to help the team and his teammate in the middle of a tough season like that . . . Well, that really showed what he is made of.”
Roger’s appreciation combined with the test work with Faustino had a revitalizing effect on Power.
“I was so relieved once I was no longer in the championship – it freed me up, my feedback to Dave became sharper, and we could just go racing. If we ended up buried in the pack because of a yellow flag or whatever, so what? I didn’t have to think about the consequences for the championship. I could just join in with all the others, and fight for my territory without having to think cautiously.”
The next race at Mid-Ohio was a false dawn for the new-look Power, as the quickest teams and drivers tried to go the race distance on only two fuel stops and there wasn’t a single caution period (for the second year in a row at this track). Thus there was the absurd spectacle of a conga-line of fast cars driven slow, and eventually getting jumped by the slow cars driving quick, their teams having committed to three pit stops. Still, inevitably, Power was the best of those who stuck with the two-stop policy and he finished fourth. Then came Sonoma.
It didn’t start too well – a mistake on his fast run meant Will couldn’t prevent a Chip Ganassi Racing 1-2 on the grid, but the race eventually distilled to a battle between himself and Scott Dixon. When they pitted together in adjacent pit boxes, Dixon in his urgency to exit struck a tire being carried by one of Power’s crew, knocking him to the ground. Thus the Kiwi served a drive-through penalty and Power was home free, once he’d shaken off the tenacious Justin Wilson in the Dale Coyne Racing entry.
“Such a relief, man: it’s been sixteen months of stupid stuff and bad luck and mistakes on my part,” said a weary-but-happy winner afterward. “It’s funny that once I stop thinking about championship points, we start getting good results.”
That win didn’t open the floodgates immediately for Power. At Baltimore, on a restart, he made a strong getaway but Dixon behind him made a better one, and his front wing was alongside the rear “bumper” of the Penske No. 12 when Will pulled right to line up a pass on Bourdais. The resulting collision effectively ended their races right there.
“I seriously didn’t know what had happened. I thought I’d hit the wall all by myself!” says Will. “I radioed Tim and said, ‘Sorry guys, I think I just went over a bump and hit the wall.’ I’d got such a good run on Bourdais that I thought there’s no way someone’s got a better one, so I hadn’t even thought to look in my mirrors. I felt terrible for Dixon just because I’d knocked him out of the race, but, on top of that, he’s the guy fighting my teammate for the championship, so I know how that looked to everyone from the outside – like I was being a you-know-what. It wasn’t that at all, but knowing some people thought that was embarrassing.”
Houston’s double-header was next and both should have resulted in start-to-finish duels between the two fastest drivers in the series, Power and Dixon, but the first got interrupted when a caution period struck just after Scott pitted and just before Will followed suit. IndyCar Race Control at that time was consistently inconsistent over whether pits should be closed or open under full-course cautions, and Power was the wrong side on that occasion. But the next day, the battle resumed, and the Australian made the decisive pass on the New Zealander at around one-third distance and went on to win. That was some help to Castroneves in his title battle with Dixon, but the Brazilian had suffered two mechanical DNFs that weekend, and would go to the final round of the season at Fontana 25 points behind the Ganassi driver.
Yet even bigger than Castroneves’ drama was the fate that befell Dario Franchitti in that second Houston race, when his car was launched into the catchfence at around 140 mph as he attempted to pass Takuma Sato. The AJ Foyt Racing car lurched sideways over a bump at precisely the wrong moment, and the monstrous shunt that followed led to Franchitti suffering a concussion severe enough to end the four-time series champion and three-time Indy 500 winner’s career.
If two victories in four races had completed Power’s rehabilitation after a long barren period, it was the next race that he and Faustino were determined to win. Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, had been his undoing the year before, but now there was no championship pressure and the No. 12 team had made some big steps on ovals. Pole position was a good sign, but then Power had taken pole at Texas, too, and that had led to a disappointing race. But this time, there were no hitches. Will led 103 of the 250 laps and ran out a convincing winner ahead of oval stars Ed Carpenter (winner of this race the previous season) and Tony Kanaan in his final event for Will’s old team, KV Racing.
“I so badly wanted to beat Ed,” recalls Will, “because he’d made some comment at that race a year earlier – that I’d done what everyone expected me to do at an oval, which was crash. So it was perfect that he was the guy trying to catch me at the end of the race, one year on. He and I get along fine now, and I have a lot of respect for his talent and the way he runs his team, but that comment had spurred me on, no question. It was a great race, a seriously eventful night, because I went to the back, went to the front, went to the back, went to the front . . . I truly felt sorry that Helio missed the championship, but after two DNFs in Houston, he’d become the long shot coming into Fontana. For myself, that season we led more laps than anyone, I had three wins in five races and I headed into the off-sea
son on a high for the first time in seven years.”
Roger Penske was thrilled for Power and disappointed for Castroneves, who had no way of making up his points deficit to Dixon, who became a three-time champion that night.
“If you’re a team owner and have more than one car in the field, you know you’re going to have days like that,” says The Captain. “There can be only one winner in every race and behind him you have a lot of disappointed drivers. In that situation, you go and congratulate the winner on a job well done and put your arm around the guy who didn’t win and figure out what you can do better next time.”
The Captain’s other guy, Power, already had that figured. He’d loved being able to quit thinking about points, championship tables and all the stuff that had once bound him up in self-absorption, paranoia, and worry. He could even look at the positive side of finishing only fourth in the championship. “I became a better driver by sharpening all my racing skills by just going for it, and I became a better oval driver. That’s what that year turned out to be about, for me.”
“Yeah, 2013 really was a blessing in disguise,” says Liz, “although at first it was a very good disguise! It really reminded Will how badly he wanted the championship, because he hated not being in contention! But at the same time, having no pressure thinking about the title was what he needed, and also what Dave needed because, like Will, Dave also needed to gain more experience and data. It freed them up to experiment more with finding something that was quick but also something that suited Will’s style. And overall, I’d say that season just molded him into a more complete driver.”
The Sheer Force of Will Power Page 26