The Sheer Force of Will Power

By Will Power and David Malsher

The story of 2014 Indy Car series champion Will Power.

From the dirt tracks of Queensland, Australia, to the road, street and oval race tracks of America, join Will Power on his torrid 20-year ride to the top of Indy car racing, culminating in the 2014 IndyCar Series championship. Arduous both mentally and physically, Will's journey pushes him to the limit as he finds fans and critics, friends and rivals - and eventually a reputation as the fastest racer in America. Off the track, Will is known as a man of individualism, dry humour, brutal honesty (particularly with himself), unshakable principles and a ferocious desire to learn fast and beat everyone else. All these qualities and more are revealed in a biography that will have you laughing, crying and in awe at just what it takes to rise to the top of professional racing. Will has taken the hard road, but a champion like Power would never do it any other way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781460705445

Will Power

I started out in San Francisco during the sixties with a rock'n'roll comedy trio called the Congress of Wonders. I have been an actor, a comedian, an announcer, a dj, a radio producer, a radio newsman, an ad copy writer, a radio and tv news copy writer. I have written scripts for stage, screen and television. I have two comedy albums, a CLIO for radio production, numerous collegiate public speaking awards and in 1949 I took first prize in the Merced, California Easter Parade for my portrayal as the Bunny King.Now I am an author.

Book preview

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my parents, brothers, my wife,

family and friends who I’ve met along the way, without whom

it would be impossible for me to be where I am today.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword by Mark Webber

Introduction by Will Power

Introduction by David Malsher

  1   Facing the demons

  2   Roots

  3   Breaking it and making it

  4   Holden his own

  5   Going international

  6   Tomorrow, the World Series

  7   Formula 1 – an unfulfilled dream

  8   Hello Team Australia

  9   Miss American Pie

10   Winning

11   Bittersweet year

12   The big chance

13   Pillar of strength

14   The long audition

15   Agony, morphine and ecstasy

16   Becoming The Man

17   Lessons learned too late

18   Don’t dream it’s over

19   One aim

20   Hot summer night

21   Onward and upward

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Photo Section

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword

By Mark Webber

Will Power – could there be a better name for a racing driver?! But, it isn’t just an awesome name, it’s one that describes the nature of the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series champion in two easy words. The first Australian to win America’s premier single-seater category, Will fought his way to the top the hard and bruising way. His career spanned three continents as he tried to keep his dream alive; from his early days plying his trade in Formula Ford, Formula 3 and Formula Holden in Australia to the brave move to Europe in 2003, where I came across him trying to carve out a career for himself in the shark-infested waters of junior racing categories. However, the pivotal point in Will’s journey came when he accepted his career wasn’t gaining the traction it needed in Europe due to a lack of funding. He simply packed his bags again, made a career-defining move to America and never looked back. As they say, the rest is history.

I’m proud to say Will has been a friend of mine for over eleven years now and I’ve watched his roller-coaster ride, delighting in his successes and commiserating with his misfortunes, none more so than when the IndyCar title slipped from his grasp three times. On two of those occasions he was beaten by another good friend of mine, Will’s arch-rival – and some would say nemesis – Dario Franchitti.

Will arrived in England with barely a couple of dollars to rub together and knowing next to nobody. I remember him racing with holes in his gloves and he’d gladly accept any hand-me-downs I could put his way – anything from visors and visor strips to training kit. While he wasn’t the only Australian to knock on our door looking for advice, Will was the first one who my partner Ann and I wanted to help. Although Will and I are from different states in Australia, he from Queensland and me from New South Wales, we are both essentially country-town boys sharing a similar upbringing and outlook on life, and a dream to do what very few Antipodean racing drivers had done before – make it to the very top of our sport. I could see plenty of the Aussie mongrel in Will. He struck me as an extremely intense and competitive individual; in fact, I’d even go so far as saying his intensity, which sometimes borders on paranoia, is precisely what has driven him to succeed at the highest level. He certainly had to use all of those qualities and more in the early days in the UK, when he was under the most pressure to keep his career alive and give it momentum. Although his results weren’t always indicative of his talent, the one constant during that tumultuous period was that each time he got in a racing car, irrespective of its performance and capabilities, he would screw every last tenth of a second out of it. To do that, he had to be versatile and quick to adapt, and this didn’t go unnoticed by those in the game. He won plenty of admirers who knew he didn’t have the best equipment at his disposal, and the small community of Australians in the UK industry rallied around and did the best they could to keep Will’s career on track, including my former team bosses, Alan Docking and Paul Stoddart.

At this time, I was racing for Jaguar in F1 and had seen enough to know Will could, with the right breaks, follow in my footsteps one day. I was happy to contribute to the pot of money he had managed to raise himself and I negotiated a deal for him to race for Trevor Carlin’s team in World Series by Renault (WSR), where he went toe-to-toe with Robert Kubica. However, I always thought that one of the biggest problems for Will throughout his early career was that he was always having to juggle his career around to find the best sponsorship opportunities and free drives. It meant he was regularly jumping in and out of other categories and cars, whether it was a bit of A1GP, V8 Supercars, F3 or WSR commitments. It was his own gutsy decision to forgo the last rounds of WSR in 2005 for a chance to race in the Surfers Paradise round of the Champ Car World Series. It proved an inspired decision as it paved the way for his transition to American racing and a full-time drive for Team Australia in the 2006 Champ Car series.

Inevitably, with both of us pursuing a professional racing career in different parts of the world, our contact became limited to the occasional phone call – generally when the chips were down for one or the other of us – and an all-too-brief catch-up when we visited for the Formula 1 race in Indianapolis, where Will first made his home in the States. Of those phone calls, there’s one that I will never forget: it came hours after Dan Wheldon tragically lost his life at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011. Will had won six races during the year and was 18 points behind Dario going into the year’s finale but his championship campaign ended in that violent high-speed fifteen-car crash and a trip to the hospital with a nasty back injury. Of course, all of that paled into insignificance given what had happened to Dan, someone both of us knew well. I spoke to Will from Singapore where I had raced in the grand prix, and it was obvious he was still in shock. But I could tell by the way he was speaking he was thinking about the bigger picture, perhaps for the first time in his career. Will matured several years during the course of that one phone conversation.

I think that day was a game-changer in Will’s career: it put things into a hugely different perspective for him. He returned for the 2012 season and mounted another strong championship campaign and although his year ended with another crash in the final round, he was now mature and composed enough to put it behind him and start a clean sheet again in 2013. He continued to excel on the street and road course tracks that had also been his bread-and-butter in Australia and Europe, but that season he started to really nail the ovals, too. Finally, in 2014 he put it all together, was strong everywhere, and the result was the Verizon IndyCar Series title.

Will’s dogged determination and perseverance continue to stand him in good stead and have made him at minimum a regular frontrunner, at best the benchmark for premier single-seater racing in America. He is respected, often grudgingly, by rivals who say that on certain days he does things with a car that blows them away; he puts on a masterclass and annihilates the field. There are no frills or fuss about Will: he’s the ultimate rugged racer who just wants to race. I wouldn’t say he couldn’t have been a top-class F1 driver, but on the other hand, I don’t think Will Power hanging out in Monaco was ever going to happen either! He’s fine just as he is – still the country-town boy from Australia who made good in America.

Introduction

By Will Power

No matter how hard a racing driver, engineer, strategist, crew chief and crew prepare for a race, there are always unexpected twists that they’ve got to react to. They start a race with Plans A, B, and C to cover the alternatives, but in a championship as close as the Verizon IndyCar Series, it’s actually Plan D that you’re forced to use because of circumstances – that’s the plan you come up with while the race is still going on! It might be a blend of those other pre-race plans, or it could be something totally different.

Well, to me, a racer’s career is very like that. You work so hard at it and you come up with aims and ambitions, but there’s no way you’re going to get your best-case scenario each time. So you’ve got to be prepared to make changes on the fly, and go down routes that you maybe didn’t consider before.

Although I didn’t like those career dilemmas at the time, looking back for the sake of this book, I found it interesting to play the chain game – If this hadn’t happened, that wouldn’t have happened; if I’d done this, maybe it would have led to that, and so on. I started my career aiming for Formula 1, but not just to be there. I never wanted to be one of those F1 drivers who spend year after year buried midfield because they don’t have a front-running car. I love racing in a series where the cars are basically equal and it comes down to the team and the driver to find the winning edge.

So when the chance came up to switch to US open-wheel racing, I didn’t hesitate. One day during a test session last year, while my Team Penske crew were working on the car, I stood on the pit wall and watched all my rivals head out on track and I was saying in my head, He could win this weekend . . . so could he . . . so could he . . . I counted twenty potential race winners, and I don’t think you get that in any other form of motorsport. That’s what I love about IndyCar.

The chance to race for a team as great as Penske has been the biggest bonus of my career, no question. Off the track, the chance to meet, date and eventually marry Elizabeth is the only exception to what I said earlier – a Plan A that I could commit to completely. Liz not only returned the favor but also committed herself to my career, and that’s something I appreciate every single day. The fact that her mom, Kathy, has also looked after me pretty much from the start of my time in the US is amazing.

Putting this book together has been an interesting experience, because it made me realize how many people have played a really significant part in getting me to where I am, and I’m very thankful how many of them have stayed fans and were pleased to contribute (see Acknowledgments, page 327). In particular, I can’t thank Mark Webber enough for not only writing the Foreword to this book but also the faith he and his partner, Ann Neal, showed in me back when I was just another crazy young racer with wild eyes and a wide-open throttle. Down the years, he’s been very good to chat with, but it’s how he handles himself that I admire most. His total determination and self-belief have never made him cocky, and I’ve seen him behave with total dignity when things have gone wrong. That sets an example for us all.

I’ve got to thank David Malsher for somehow coming up with 100,000 words about me. I’ve been reading his stories for ten years now and I like his writing style; he loves Indy car racing and, like Derrick Walker told me back in 2006, Malsher gets it. But maybe most importantly, he’s fair. In fact, that’s a big part of why I asked David to write the book – not because he’s a stone-cold disciple of mine, but because he’s not. He’s honest to me and about me, and I’ve always responded to him in the same way.

In fact, as you’ll discover when you read this book, throughout my time in motorsport, I’ve only listened to people who offer tough love, because I don’t want to hear anything except the truth. That way, I can improve myself and gauge my progress, and that’s important to me because I always have new goals.

This story is about the goals I’ve achieved so far.

Charlotte, North Carolina

June 2015

Introduction

By David Malsher

In the first two races in which I saw Will Power compete, he finished second each time. They were hugely creditable performances given that he was competing in British Formula 3 and on neither occasion was he with the best team. At that time, this now defunct series contained a deeper talent pool of open-wheel racers than any other junior series on earth.

But would this young Aussie become exceptional? It was too early to say. Nigel Mansell, who went on to become Formula 1 World Champion and Indy car champion, had looked good but nothing special in Formula 3. By way of contrast, Jan Magnussen had finally broken the legendary Ayrton Senna’s victory tally in his season of F3, yet achieved nothing at the top levels of open-wheel racing. In other words, Formula 3 can only tell you so much. If Will was to become as outstanding on the world stage as he had been in the Australian junior categories of the sport, it was down to him. Thankfully, he was more prepared to commit to his career than I was prepared to commit to an opinion about his potential . . .

Eighteen months later, our paths crossed for maybe three minutes of driver–journalist one-on-one time at his second-ever Champ Car World Series race in Mexico City. He’d done a fine job a couple of weeks earlier on his series debut in front of his home crowd in Surfers Paradise, Australia, because, despite being overwhelmed by the attention from the local media and well-wishing compatriots, he looked anything but overawed on track. And here in Mexico, he looked like he’d been driving these 750 hp Champ Car monsters for years. I spent one practice session watching at the fast S-bends at the back of the track and, while Will’s exuberance caused him to make occasional minor errors, his commitment was total. This guy was clearly intimidated by nothing.

His first full season at this level, 2006, convinced me that Will was a driver of real substance. At first he blew hot and cold from race to race as he learned the cars and the tracks. But by the second half of the season, I realized we were watching a driver rapidly evolve into a genuine match for Champ Car’s top dogs of the time. The day Will clinched the Rookie of the Year title was the first time he and I sat down for a proper interview, as opposed to me just grabbing quotes about what went wrong or right for him in practice, qualifying or a race.

I still recall how extraordinary he was. I encountered a young man of brutal honesty. He wasn’t quite ready to be completely open, but what he did say was meaningful and detailed. No bullshit, no bland generalizations. What really distinguished him from most of his colleagues was that he wasn’t on the defensive. Will admitted his errors and didn’t try to blame the team or another driver. In fact, even when discussing incidents in which the other party had already admitted being at fault, Will would qualify his version of the same event with something along the lines of but maybe I could have done this or that. In other words, he went out of his way to claim some responsibility.

Almost a decade later, while Mr Power has increased in status – as I write this he’s amassed twenty-five Indy car wins, forty-one pole positions, a hard-earned IndyCar Series title, and he drives for the most prestigious team in US motorsport history – the man himself hasn’t changed. He’s coated his talent in thick layers of experience, but his soul is still laid bare in interviews and he continues to examine his own performances in a harsh and critical manner.

And that is what has served him so well as a racer; the complete absence of arrogance has allowed him to constantly improve himself because he never underestimates the opposition. He once told me: "I’ve never raced against anyone who I felt I couldn’t beat if I worked hard enough. So I go to every race feeling that my close rivals can beat me if they work hard enough. So I have to work harder." I can’t help but deeply admire anyone, in any walk of life, who is so devoted to their craft. The fact that he’s truly exceptional at it is his just reward.

Will and I had talked for three or four years about writing a book together, so when he got a concrete offer from HarperCollins Australia and called me, I told him it would be an honor. It has been that and more.

Newport Beach, California

June 2015

Chapter 1

Facing the demons

It’s Will Power’s final pre-race TV interview at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, California, before embarking on the last stage of his quest for the 2014 Verizon IndyCar Series championship. With his facial lines and features accentuated in the shadows cast by a setting SoCal sun, Power looks more weary than tense, but his words and manner betray him. The Australian drawl sounds languid enough to convince the unaware that he’s perhaps about to get in his street car and drive to a store, but his replies start early – unusual for a guy who likes to measure all angles of an interviewer’s questions before opening his mouth – and they’re also very guarded. The TV guy’s smart, realizes he’s not going to get any deep insights at this juncture, detects the Enough already vibe from the title favorite, and closes out.

A vague flicker of a smile for the cameras from the driver as the interview ends – actually, it’s more a thanks for taking the hint, pal – then visible relief in Will’s body language as he turns to the people assembled around the back of his racecar. Right now, just a few moments before he pulls on his balaclava and crash helmet, they’re the only people he wants to speak to and listen to, the only ones who matter. There’s his wife, Liz; his race engineer, Dave Faustino; his strategist, overseer and Team Penske president, Tim Cindric; and his crew, headed by chief mechanic Matt Jonsson. They’ve shared his quest for the IndyCar title, this year and seasons past, and so have thrilled at his highs and suffered through his lows. If there are any people with as much riding on this result as Power, they’re within this tight-knit group. All seem in good spirits, projecting confidence, trying to keep their driver loose and relaxed.

Actually, there are a few others with just as much vested in the quest: both sides of the family, naturally, countless folk from principal sponsor Verizon, and several people within the Penske organization – not least Roger Penske, The Captain, himself. However, there’s an odd twist here. While Roger Penske’s in the happy position of knowing he’s pretty much guaranteed one of his drivers will win the championship tonight, he’s calling for the other one, Helio Castroneves. Not cheering, note, but calling, as in calling race strategy. Now, RP’s squad is a famed and consummate example of the no-‘I’-in-‘team’ cliché, but from Power’s perspective that other cliché – if one wins, we all win – can’t even be contemplated. For one thing, it goes against instinct for a racecar driver to think that way; your teammate is one of your principal rivals. Secondly, Will’s witnessed the good-natured competition between his own man, Cindric, and Penske when they’re battling strategically from the pit wall. Will knows what a buzz his legendary boss will get if Castroneves, in his fifteenth season at the team, finally wins his first IndyCar championship. Not surprisingly, Castroneves’ three Indianapolis 500 wins for Team Penske have earned him a special place in Roger’s heart.

But it’s his performance through 2014 that has earned Castroneves another dose of respect from Power. For much of his IndyCar career, Castroneves gave the impression that despite an abundance of natural talent and car control, he was both lacking technical savvy and also consistency, and so his form each year was patchy. Come the end of any given season, it was all too easy to see how/where/why his title hopes had disappeared. However, since Power’s arrival at Penske as a part-timer in 2009, the veteran has gradually upped his technical game, and Jonathan Diuguid, Helio’s race engineer since 2013, has taken that process even further. Now, at the age of thirty-nine, Castroneves is expected to be a threat on any type of racetrack on the IndyCar calendar – street course, natural road course, short oval and superspeedway. As a genuinely impressed Power puts it, Helio is faster than ever, and he’s aware this is both a blessing and a curse. The yin is that Castroneves’ feedback is now a hell of a lot more useful to both Will and Team Penske as a whole; the yang for Will is that now he has a tougher rival – a major championship threat, and one who’s blessed with the exact same resources and, theoretically, the exact same car.

Still, no gain without pain: his teammate’s renewed strength is something Power has learned to live with throughout this season. Overall, he regards it as a positive, acknowledging that his own competitive desire feeds off a regularly refueled rivalry – a process that isn’t discouraged at Team Penske. Ol’ Roger is traditionally swift to prevent intra-team struggles getting out of control and spilling into the public domain, but he’s also an ex-racing driver who likes to see his guys push one another. And, anyway, The Captain is well aware that he can’t change nature: a topline racer is one of an ultra-competitive breed, desperate to prove who’s top dog in any and every situation. Housing at least two of them may have its occasional downside but, overall, should benefit the team.

Should. In the case of these two, Team Penske’s yet to feel that benefit in championship terms. Despite all the race wins accrued in five full seasons together, Power and Castroneves (who’s been with the team since 2000) have finished runner-up in the IndyCar points table three times each, and between them have claimed this first-of-the-losers slot for the past four years. Thus 2014 is regarded both internally and externally as a welcome change. The IndyCar Series itself is guaranteed a first-time champ, and Roger Penske is all but guaranteed his first IndyCar champion in eight years. Schmidt Peterson Motorsports’ Simon Pagenaud has impressed many by clinging to an outside chance of taking the honors in this final round, but it would require a highly unlikely string of events to occur – something akin to both Penske drivers being abducted by aliens in the early laps this evening.

Mind you, that concept is only slightly weirder than what’s actually happened to Power recently. This race at Fontana is the climax of a crazy fourteen days for him – a typical sample of the 2014 season and, arguably, Will’s career as a whole.

Two weeks ago, around the flat one-mile oval in Milwaukee for the sixteenth of the season’s eighteen rounds, Power’s searing run to pole position proved the cornerstone for arguably the most dominant drive by any IndyCar driver all year. On race day, the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske entry was at the front for 229 of the 250 laps of America’s oldest track. Almost as significantly, Power’s nearest opponent that weekend wasn’t Castroneves but the other Penske machine of former Indy car champion Juan Pablo Montoya, who thereby statistically kept himself in the title hunt. Realistically, the Colombian’s chances were still tenuous, but at least that would mentally free him to just go for it over the final two races, unhindered by thoughts of the championship. If it happened, it happened; if not, no worries, because no one was expecting it. Castroneves, by contrast, left Milwaukee still very much in the running for that first elusive crown, yet had just suffered a psychological blow. That weekend he was relatively nowhere, lapped by his teammates on his way to a dismal eleventh-place finish.

Power was by no means home and dry, though, and felt awkward the following week when legendary Indy car journalist and broadcaster Robin Miller wrote a story on RACER.com pointing out that Will should have been heading to the penultimate race in Sonoma, California, with the title all but sewn up. Instead, IndyCar’s controversial preseason decision to give out double points for the three 500-mile races – Indianapolis, Pocono and the finale in Fontana – had artificially kept Castroneves in the title hunt. Under the traditional points system, wrote Miller, Power would have a 75-point buffer between himself and his teammate, despite Castroneves’ runner-up places at both Indianapolis and Pocono, where Power had finished a relatively disastrous ninth and tenth respectively. The reality, by contrast, was that the gap was 39 points . . . and there were 158 left on the table.

IndyCar’s new points system, then, had done its job by almost guaranteeing the championship would remain open until the final checkered flag. Some tried to justify this random doubling of the value of three races, but most thought it ridiculous that seventh place at, say, Pocono could earn a driver as many points as winning at Long Beach or Mid-Ohio.

It’s the same for everybody – nothing we can do except keep focused and earn as many points as possible, Power told Miller. But that was Will deliberately sounding reasoned while on the record. Away from the Dictaphones and video cameras, he’d been aggravated by this misguided notion ever since IndyCar had announced it less than two weeks before the first round. And now that rule was biting him on the ass.

At least the Milwaukee win had dampened his agitation – Our path is easier now, but it’s by no means easy – and Will went into Sonoma as confident as a glass-half-empty guy can be. A late-season breakthrough in car setup had renewed the confidence of both he and Faustino that the perplexing technical misstep that dogged the No. 12 car for much of the year was now behind them.

Sonoma Raceway, the beautiful, undulating road course in California’s Napa Valley, is a track with which Power has a love– hate relationship. It’s where, in 2009, he suffered his biggest career setback – namely, a broken back – but also a venue at which he’d since delivered three wins and three pole positions in four years. And in 2014, he was on his usual form around the 12-turn, 2.52-mile layout, grabbing pole by over three-tenths of a second. On a 77-second lap that margin sounds minimal, but it was as commanding an edge as it’s possible to achieve in modern-era Indy car racing. And on a circuit where it’s notoriously difficult to pass, no less important was the fact that Castroneves was down in sixth after blowing his last qualifying run. The other title contender, Pagenaud, appeared out of the equation, braking issues confining the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports driver to fifteenth on the grid.

Power, who’d confessed he’d stopped sleeping well after taking pole at Milwaukee, went to bed that night in Sonoma with the same feeling as seven days earlier – first job done but primary job tomorrow. However he was in for the rudest of rude awakenings. A 6.0 magnitude earthquake shook the foundations of his hotel at 3.20 a.m., sending picture frames, bottles and bathroom mirrors crashing to the floor and triggering the hotel staff to evacuate the building. It wasn’t the end of the world, as Power had assumed when he was first rattled to his senses, but it was the end of the night’s rest for him.

As a man who says he can’t function without a good night’s sleep, Will functioned just fine for the first twenty-nine laps of the race and continued his domination of the weekend. However two back-to-back full-course caution periods bunched the field together and triggered a round of pit stops, and it was at this point, when every tenth of a second was vital, that Chip Ganassi Racing’s pit crew vaulted reigning champion Scott Dixon out of the pits ahead of Power. They re-emerged in seventh and eighth, behind only those who’d gone off-strategy and elected not to stop. Now Will had a fight on his hands for the first time all day.

And he blew it. Coming down to the hairpin Turn 7 following the restart, Power hugged the inside line and braked early to avoid running into Dixon. That allowed two other cars on his outside to draw level and crowd the No. 12, forcing it to remain on the inside at corner exit to avoid losing his front wing on another car. Problem was, that was the unused part of the track, and was covered in rubber marbles from the tires of passing racecars, as well as the coating of sand and dust inherent with Sonoma Raceway. Will got on the gas a fraction too hard and too soon for his fresh but cold tires to handle.

It was like I was on ice, he said afterward. The back came around so suddenly, considering how slow we go through there [approximately 35 mph], at first I thought someone must have hit me. And then, once the car had let go, I just had to gas it, make sure I didn’t stall. If I’d stalled, we might have gone a lap down while the Safety Team got me restarted.

A sequence of spectacular smoky pirouettes got the car pointing the right way, so all was not lost. All was not good, either. Power was now at the back of the pack, with an ill-handling car thanks to the violent heat cycle the rear tires had been put through in just a few abrasive seconds. Saving the engine had killed the Firestones and for the remainder of the stint, he was just trying to control the violently wayward rear end of the car while not losing touch with the back of the pack.

Man, that was hard, said Power, eyes widening at the recollection. I had no rear grip at all. I was just on tip-toes through the fast sections and I did almost lose it at one point where the car went light over a crest. All I could do was maintain the gap to whoever was in front.

One of those in front and, amazingly, not too far in front, was Castroneves. He’d been caught up in a Lap 1 collision not of his making, had made an extra pit stop for repairs and was now running eighteenth, just two cars ahead of his teammate. Bearing in mind Montoya had only just reached the top ten – a qualifying indiscretion had consigned him to near the back of the grid – Penske’s day was now looking pretty disastrous. But Power could still make progress. A strong out-lap on cold tires after his second pit stop put him ahead of Castroneves and as others’ pit strategies played out, he was into the top dozen when he muscled past James Hinchcliffe of Andretti Autosport in the closing stages. Boldly diving down the inside of Justin Wilson’s Dale Coyne Racing machine at the final turn of