Chill Will: Power is more mellow and serene, and it's paying dividends heading into Indy 500
INDIANAPOLIS – There’s a serenity about NTT IndyCar Series driver Will Power this year that’s, well, jarring.
The man whose blood has boiled after tough breaks on the track and rarely hesitated to voice how he felt seems more willing to move on this year. Maybe it’s because he has run upfront in all five of this season's races thus far, finishing fourth three times and third twice, and holds the series points lead heading into Sunday’s Indianapolis 500.
The old Power, though, rarely let a frustrating moment go without a strong opinion about it. He did roast IndyCar officials in this year’s opener at St. Petersburg after he believed Jimmie Johnson held him up late in the race, but mostly he’s been Chill Will.
Simon Pagenaud, his former teammate with Team Penske, was so struck by Power’s demeanor after the GMR Grand Prix on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course this month, he called him out.
“What happened to you?” Pagenaud asked. “Who is this guy?”
“I’m not having issues with spark plugs and brakes and – what else went wrong? – the car not starting,” Power answered, recounting some of the snake bites he experienced last year.
And then Power, winner of the 2018 Indy 500, revealed what’s up: “Just changed my whole mentality. Put my head down and do the work.”
It’s like a chapter from the Rick Mears book on how to win the 500 multiple times. Mears, a four-time Indy winner with Team Penske who’s now a team advisor, has seen the change in Power.
“I think this year he’s made a conscious effort to just say, ‘I’m not going to let some of this stuff worry me as much as it did,’ ” Mears said. “It’s like instead of putting the pressure on myself -- feeling like I have to have the fastest lap, fastest everything -- just settle in and take what we can get for the day. I think that’s the attitude he’s developed this year.”
It’s a mindset Power takes into the 500, where he’s the fastest of the three Team Penske qualifiers. He’ll start in the middle of the fourth row after a four-lap average of 231.534 mph. Power said, without complaint, that’s all he could get out of the car in qualifying.
“I think he’s just worked on not being frustrated,” Mears said. “I always thought that crying over spilt milk doesn’t do any good. On the race track, if somebody cut me off in Turn 1 and made me mad, I wanted to be over it by Turn 2 so all the focus could be on the driving and not what I was mad about.
"That was more important to me. I used to listen to other guys with other teams yelling and screaming on the radio for two laps after something happened, and I’d think, ‘How the hell are you driving the car?’ I couldn’t scream and yell on the radio and still drive the car, so to me it was a waste.
“I think Will has kind of taken that attitude. If we’ve got a fourth-place car, we need to settle in. If we can get third place, fine, but if not we’ll take fourth. I think that’s great for (winning) championships.”
Case in point: Power won the pole position for the IMS road course race and finished third on a rainy day when those who pushed too hard often spun off track. He was perfectly fine with that finish.
“Sometimes you have to be smart about it,” Power said. “If I had the car to win and the chance to win without big risk, I would definitely have gone for it.”
Don't be surprised if you see Will Power out front early and a lot in Sunday's Indy 500. Photo: Joe Skibinski / IndyCar
Would a much younger Will Power have shown the same restraint? Maybe, maybe not. Mears said Power’s passion, and that he expressed it openly, were good early in his career.
“It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in that respect,” he said. “That’s what helped make him who he is and has gotten him what he’s got.”
But now, at age 41, Power accepts that racing is a cyclical sport for any team, even the powerful Team Penske, Mears said.
“This whole business is peaks and valleys,” Mears said. “When I signed on with Roger Penske (in 1978), he offered me a part-time deal to start with, and I thought a part-time deal with this man is better than a full-time deal with most.
"When I got the opportunity to be here full-time, over the years there were team owners who’d say, ‘You ready yet?’ trying to hire me. But I knew Roger’s operation, that his valleys were fewer and further between, and they weren’t as long just because of the way he operates and his desire to be competitive and run well.
"I knew as long as I could stay here, on average it was going to be better off. We had our down times; we went through them with the PC 15 and 16 (chassis). We just had to keep going with it and develop it, and I knew it would turn around at some point. And it did.
“That’s what (Will) had to do. Yeah, he had weird stuff happen that was out of his control. It’s just part of this business and what else are you going to do? You can rant and rave about it but that doesn’t do any good either. So you just persevere, and that’s what he did.”
Mears sees no reason Power – Chill Will – can’t achieve even more. A second Indy 500 victory Sunday or his second career season championship are very possible.
“He’s still very fast,” Mears said. “He can keep accomplishing things until he decides he doesn’t want to.”