The Sheer Force of Will Power

by David Malsher

  Faustino agrees that the progress he and Power made on ovals that season was the long-awaited big leap forward.

  “The ovals are so hard now, with the tires falling off by 10 or 12 mph over a stint,” he muses, “so it really means something to succeed on them. We made a lot of strides in how to get a quick car on ovals – I really got my head down, Will got his head down, the team did some great work, and we really made some groundbreaking understandings on making a good oval car. Winning the race that night in Fontana was the pinnacle for us.”

  Until that point, at least . . .

  Chapter 19

  One aim

  “I’d never seen anything like it,” says Kathy Cannon of her son-in-law’s focus in the winter of 2013–14. “I mean, I’d thought Will was driven, but there was something quite spooky about how hard he pushed himself that off-season. And there was no comparison to the two previous years – 2011 when he’d been upset about Dan’s death, and 2012 when he was depressed and thinking he maybe didn’t have it in him to get a championship.”

  Adds Elizabeth: “It took that 2013 season to help Will realize how much better it was to not think about the championship and instead just go out and do your best at every race.”

  Will agrees: “That thing I said all through 2014 about not paying attention to the points was absolutely true. I only knew the championship standings when the media mentioned it to me. I was literally just focusing on each race, just like I had in the second half of the season before, and I think that was good. I just wanted to win everything, and if I couldn’t win, be second, and so on. I just played each situation or circumstance as it came. I think if you start a year saying, ‘I’m going to do this,’ I think you’re screwed because if things don’t go according to that plan, it starts playing on your mind. You can’t be that specific; just try to win them all and always be prepared for anything and everything.”

  Rick Mears agrees, although he admits, “I did like to set myself goals but, like Will says, what I wouldn’t do is completely hang my hat on them because that gives you a do-or-die approach, which can lead to mistakes. So I’d really break it down and think, ‘Let’s get this lap under our belt, and get to the next one. Then use the first half of the race to get to the second half, and then work out how to get to the front if we’re not already there. If I’ve got a third-place car, finish third. If I can crack the door open to grab second place, go for it, absolutely, but only if you’re not jeopardizing the third. And never think about the next race until you’ve done your best in this one.’

  “I realize this sounds like small-picture mentality, but that’s the method of painting the big picture and the way Will looked at things in 2014. It was, ‘Let’s not worry about the season as a whole; let’s be the best we can be at this event, and then do the same at the next one and the next, and the next . . .’ Because gradually that collage of small pictures builds up, and then you stand back and realize that putting them all together has also formed a big picture, and that’s your championship.”

  Winning the 2014 season-opener at St Petersburg was the perfect start, and took Will’s recent victory tally to four wins in the previous six races.

  He admits: “Honestly, the whole momentum thing didn’t occur to me until someone pointed that out. I was like, ‘Oh yeah . . .’ but, to me, every year is a do-over – every race is a do-over, to be honest.”

  Matt ‘Swede’ Jonsson, crew chief for Will’s car since the start of 2013, says: “I know what Will’s saying, because there are so many things that have to go right in order to get a win. But in terms of team members’ mental states, yeah, I do believe in momentum. In 2013 it was a whole new crew on the No. 12 car, and that took a while to gel together . . . and obviously we had bad luck, too. But by the end of that season we were operating well and our record was great.”

  Team Penske president, Tim Cindric, as a fan and student of many sports, shares Jonsson’s views.

  “I look at other sports and I see momentum equates to confidence,” he explains, “and that’s why I thought the championship was a strong possibility for 2014. This is a team sport – maybe you can say momentum equals confidence multiplied by team members – and we had a situation where Dave [Faustino] and the whole group knew they could accomplish big things together and nobody on that team doubted anyone else. There was self-belief and belief in each other. Will’s exclamation point at the end of 2013 had been dominating Fontana. I heard him describe it as the biggest win of his career, and that’s when I knew for sure that 2014 was going to be a very different type of year.”

  And it was different, even before the first race. For one thing, Verizon came on board as title sponsor of the IndyCar Series. For another, Team Penske re-expanded its IndyCar operation to three cars, with the third machine to be driven by Juan Pablo Montoya. The 1999 CART Indy car champion, 2000 Indy 500 winner, and multiple Formula 1 race winner had been driving for Chip Ganassi Racing in NASCAR since he abruptly quit F1 in the middle of the 2006 season, and though driving stock cars had padded his bank account, it hadn’t resulted in much success. That was a huge waste, because Montoya had been one of the fastest firebrands in open-wheel racing over the past quarter-century and a return to his roots was an intriguing career twist . . . and an intriguing choice by Penske. Did JPM still have the motivation to relearn this style of racing?

  The third point of interest was that Chip Ganassi Racing, having won the IndyCar championship with Honda engines, joined Penske in the Chevrolet camp for 2014, replaced the newly retired Dario Franchitti with Tony Kanaan in the No. 10 car, and added a fourth car for Power’s old teammate, Ryan Briscoe. Andretti Autosport, meanwhile, went in the opposite direction, exchanging Chevys for Hondas, and continued with a four-car lineup of Ryan Hunter-Reay, Marco Andretti, James Hinchcliffe and rookie Carlos Munoz.

  If St Pete had hinted at domination of the big teams – Power led home Hunter-Reay and Castroneves – the second race of the year at Long Beach demonstrated IndyCar’s capacity to surprise. The combined eleven-car armada of Penske, Ganassi and Andretti were defeated by Ed Carpenter Racing’s Mike Conway, who would fill in for team boss Carpenter on all the road and street courses. Power’s preseason observation that “those days are gone of any driver dominating or scoring more than four wins” would prove very accurate.

  Long Beach would also demonstrate some of the main factors that would shape Power’s season as a whole. First, there was the calamitous-looking fourteenth in qualifying. “Setup-wise, we weren’t getting it right on street courses all year,” says Will, “and if this book was at the end of my career, I’d explain . . . but I could be fighting these guys for another ten years, so I’m not giving away what we learned! But anyway, it was a pretty fundamental issue, and we didn’t get it solved until [the penultimate race] Sonoma, and then boom, we were quickest by four-tenths [of a second] or whatever. I’m pissed off it took that long to figure out, but it’s kinda funny that we won the championship with a car I didn’t like until the last road course race of the season!”

  Another significant characteristic that Power showed at Long Beach was the one he’d promised – aggression. He made several bold moves that day as he came through from the second half of the grid. And only one of them looked dubious, the one that saw him punt Simon Pagenaud into the tire wall.

  “He was going so slow and he took that corner so wide, I honestly thought he had a problem,” explains Will, “so I started going up the inside of him and he turned in. But yeah, he was right to be pissed about it afterwards, and I’m surprised I didn’t get a drive-through penalty, especially considering how many I got in the races after that.”

  But that race also revealed the canny “think-big-picture” mentality of the guy in the No. 12 car. “Although I was trying to win everything,” say Will, “that was one of the races where I played it smart, and didn’t go for a move on Conway in those last few laps. There were a couple of other times like that, too: I didn’t pick a fight with Helio [C
astroneves] in the second Detroit race or Tony Kanaan in the second Toronto race. Basically, I was picking my moments to be aggressive.”

  Even an off in the wet while leading at Barber Motorsports Park didn’t leave him too morose, despite only salvaging fifth. Annoyed with himself, yes, but not downhearted. That was significant progress from previous years.

  “Mentally, Will became really well balanced between races,” says Elizabeth, “and I think that proved to himself that if he’d paid less attention to points in previous years, it would have worked better for him. There had been times when other drivers took advantage of Will being cautious because he was thinking about the championship. Well in 2013, finally he realized he had to go for it in order not to get run over by the drivers who weren’t racing for the title. Once he became more aggressive, I think he had fewer incidents, because he was driving in his natural way.”

  “Liz is right,” says Power. “I’d really improved myself, especially on starts and restarts, where in previous years I’d been too conservative – trying not to lose instead of trying to win. I’d been outside my comfort zone. Being timid isn’t how I race. My natural state in a car is aggressive.”

  There were two IndyCar races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2014, the first being on the road course which uses the front straight of the hallowed oval (run the reverse direction), before turning off onto a smooth 2.44-mile infield circuit. But whichever way he was pointing, he remained snakebit at the Racing Capital of the World. A drive-through penalty for running over an air-hose (team error) in the Grand Prix of Indianapolis was followed by the same penalty for speeding in the pits (driver error) in the Indy 500, and resulted in an eighth-place finish both times.

  Yet, just a week later, he was able to present Roger Penske and Jim Campbell of Chevrolet with a decent consolation prize – victory at their home race in Belle Isle, Detroit, after two years of the Motown races being dominated by Honda. Castroneves backed this up the next day, heading Power in a Penske 1-2, and although Power considered trying to grab the lead on the final restart, he decided a wheel-to-wheel battle with his teammate was the less prudent course of action for the team’s sake. He’d already served a drive-through penalty that race for an eminently debatable collision, so it was a day for not pushing his luck.

  The second place that followed at Texas Motor Speedway was more aggravating because, for the second year in a row, Power had set pole position there and this time had also led the most laps. However, as he came up to lap Castroneves, the Brazilian (understandably) showed a reluctance to let him through. That allowed Carpenter – the only driver able to look after his tires over a whole stint like Power – to draft past and pull a slight lead. Then, when Will tried to gain time on pit lane entry and came in too fast – “Er . . . quite a bit too fast,” smiles Faustino – he received another drive-through penalty. Grabbing fresh tires for a final three-lap sprint to the checkered flag following a restart saw Power leap from fifth to second in a thrilling finish, but it was less than he’d hoped for going into the race.

  Still, it was better than his qualifying performances on street courses, which, at Houston, reached their low point. For both races, Penske No. 12 started eighteenth. Yet while once upon a time this might have thrown out Will’s equilibrium, it now just made him more determined.

  “Yeah, Detroit and Houston were bad,” acknowledges Faustino, “but it’s not like we kept taking a big swing at setup and missing. The problem was that all year we were trying to find a setup that would give Will an edge. In the third year of the same chassis, that’s what you have to do, because the competition gets tighter and tighter as everyone learns the car and catches up. So he was working really hard at that and pushing me to do the same, but the direction we were going in was actually slowly evolving away from what he wanted! That really hurt us because on tracks where you never get to test and you may only have one clear lap in qualifying, the driver’s got to be totally comfortable and confident from the moment he starts the run.”

  The other problem was the severely restricted track time allowed by the series. As with most governing bodies in this era, in order to keep costs down and prevent the best-funded teams running away from the hand-to-mouthers, IndyCar permitted little in the way of testing. In addition, the severely compressed schedule – eighteen races in just five months – meant that, if a team lost its competitive edge, it stayed lost for a number of races. Even with the relatively vast resources at Team Penske, it was hard to dig yourself out of a technical hole.

  “But, you know, we never panicked – not Will, not Tim, not myself, nor anyone on our crew,” Faustino states firmly. “We got pissed off, trust me, but we all stayed very confident we could move forward. If you start at the front, it’s easy to slip into the mode of, ‘Okay, let’s protect this,’ so you maybe go a bit conservative on tire strategy or pit strategy or pace. When you start at the back, it eliminates any questions: you have no choice, you do whatever you can, and that nothing-to-lose mentality relaxes everybody. Those were the days when we saw Will driving like a racecar driver, not just a fast driver.”

  “Yeah, and the 2013 experience helped,” agrees Power, “because I just kept charging. On race day, running that little bit away from the edge you’re on in qualifying, our car was usually handling really well. In the first [wet] race at Houston, I put my wheel on a wet line as I went to turn in and half spun into a tire wall when we’d got up to twelfth. But in the second race, we were up to third place by one-third distance. Man, that was fun – super-aggressive passes – so I’m sure we’d have won; there was nothing anyone else had that we couldn’t match. Unfortunately, we had that part fail . . .”

  Faustino recalls with suppressed disgust: “The part that failed – a camber clevis, where you add shims to alter the camber of a wheel – was a problem that had affected Montoya and [Josef] Newgarden on the Indy road course a few races earlier, and there’d been rumblings of issues in years before. We thought we’d taken all the necessary precautions, but in Houston’s second race, right about the time Will got to third, he radioed in and told us the rear was acting strangely. Well, I looked at his steering traces and could see he was having to do lots of extra corrections because all the camber shims had fallen out – basically, his rear wheel was rocking back and forth even along the straights, and then leaning over in the corners! I mean, it was really amazing to me that it looked like he was going to finish third with it like this for half the race, but then suddenly the clevis sheared in half, he had to crawl around on the last lap, finishing eleventh.”

  If nothing else, it was public proof of a somewhat unheralded talent of Power’s. “Will uses his equipment really well,” says Jonsson, “and by that I mean he drives the car to the maximum it’s capable of giving, particularly in qualifying. Everyone knows that one of his fortes is to put all that focus into that killer lap to get pole position. But Will also understands the mechanics of a car and doesn’t abuse equipment where it gives up earlier than we’d planned. I wouldn’t say he nurses the car, but he can certainly look after it.”

  While a fourteenth and eleventh at Houston aren’t even good enough to be classified as mediocre results, Faustino kept trying to look at the positives. “As usual, we didn’t get any lucky results in 2014, except maybe not getting penalized for hitting Simon at Long Beach. But our luck, if you want to call it that, was that our bad days coincided with our main championship rivals having bad days, too. I specifically remember telling Will after Houston, ‘Look, this year we’ve had some of the shittiest results we’ve ever had together, but none of our main rivals has been able to take advantage of it.’”

  No sooner said than done. With Ganassi having yet to win, and Castroneves and Hunter-Reay being 40 points behind Will in the championship, the Pocono 500 – like Indy and Fontana, worth double points in 2014 – was going to be the chance for Power to substantially increase his points lead, or for his pursuers to take a huge chunk out of it . . .

  Pocono
Raceway, the 2.5-mile tri-oval in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, could have been the site of Team Penske’s first 1-2-3 since Power led Briscoe and Castroneves across the line at Sonoma three years earlier. Even when polesitter Montoya drafted past Power following a late restart, there was every chance that Power could fight back. Instead, he lost momentum and a position to Munoz during the maneuver, and when he tried and failed to re-pass the Andretti driver, he lost yet more momentum. That dropped him into the reaches of Castroneves. Coming along the main straight, Castroneves moved to pass and Power moved to block. Castroneves moved to pass again and Power moved again. The drive-through penalty that followed was inevitable.

  “It was an ugly move,” says Mears solemnly, “and showed a temper in Will that I thought we’d eradicated. But, to be fair, it was the only big mark against him that year, and to take a balanced view, I know absolutely that Helio has done the same to Will in the past – given him the big chop or block. Helio is no angel – blocking is almost ingrained in his psyche! But there are times to take the high road, and that was what Will should have done. At the very least, he cost himself a third place finish and dropped to wherever, but he also cost Roger a 1-2-3, all because he pulled a reflex move without thinking. And, boy, it wasn’t subtle. I mean, there are ways to hold someone up without doing that!”

  After being told of his penalty, Power had a meltdown over the radio, along the lines of IndyCar Race Control trying to spice up the championship by hitting him with drive-throughs.

  Tim Cindric attempted to cool his driver. “I just told him to get his head back in the game and go,” he recalls. “When I worked with Helio, we used to have a saying that it was time to shut up and drive. You never want to say that over the radio because it can divide the team, but if I said to him, ‘Hey, what time is it?’ he knew exactly what that meant!”