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Something new happened in 2021 for Will Power. He struggled for speed.
Whatever your opinions on Power’s ability to go the distance as a regular title contender, he’s won a race in every single year of his IndyCar career.
He has 38 wins and 55 poles, and has delivered qualifying averages of 2.2 (2010) and 2.8 (2018) that simply boggle the mind when you think about them.
However, in 2021, he’s yet to score a pole – after netting five last year – and there are only four races remaining this season.
It’s took 12 races to score a first win of the year, too.
He righted that wrong brilliantly under heavy pressure and with a complicated race on the Indianapolis road course on Saturday, which makes him the most successful driver on this layout with five wins. Add his 2018 Indy 500 win and he’s got more IndyCar wins at Indianapolis than anyone else.
After his struggles this year – even at the Indy 500 where he only scraped into the field in bump day having only qualified outside the top 10 twice since 2008 previously – he needed this result and it was the perfect place to get it.
“It was such a weird slump for me because normally when I’m not winning it’s not because of lack of pace,” Power says in the wake of his Indy victory.
“But there have been times this year where it’s been a struggle to get the pace, and the car right. I start digging a lot deeper and trying to understand what is going on, why am I not fast? I couldn’t just lose it all in a year.
“You just start going back to your old ways of doing stuff when you were super quick, and you can’t leave anything on the table.
“I have to say it’s the first sort of slump I’ve had as far as performance has gone in my career.
“I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a lack of pace. It was doing mistakes in qualifying, which is very unusual for me. I’d usually really put it together.
“Last year I put it together the best I ever had putting laps together, like zero mistakes and was so good at just getting it done, and this year I’ve been on laps that will get me through each round and then I’ll make a little mistake or something will go wrong, I’ll get traffic.
“All that is so important to control, and I wasn’t.”
Asked what he found when he investigated that slump, Power added: “Well, it’s a bit of mental prep and it’s also last week [in Nashville] when you have three laps to do your lap, and on a street course it can go yellow pretty easy, and that’s exactly what happened.
“I was on a lap and I aborted it, and next lap I started which would have got me through, Josef [Newgarden] went in the wall and went yellow.
“I should know that. I should know that you cannot ever be out of that top six.
“Every lap you’ve got to update yourself into the top six, and it’s just not being on the game, on the ball. You should know that. It cost me a potential chance to be in the Fast Six.”
Penske’s struggles this year have certainly played a role as it also took double champion Josef Newgarden 10 races to score his and the team’s first of the year.
It seems ever since Power signed a deal that will keep him in the series through 2023 ahead of this season’s opener at Barber, things have worked against him.
He’s been in a hole like this before, but as he explained, he’s very infrequently questioned or second guessed himself and on Saturday he almost wished for the victory so hard, it happened.
He’s been close earlier in the season. A red flag in the first Detroit win cost him victory when his car wouldn’t restart due to a lack of cooling on the ECU. The aggression behind his tirade towards IndyCar for not allowing such cooling under red-flag conditions proved how much a victory would have meant to him.
“It just blows my mind some of the things that can go wrong at such a critical time, but all I was thinking about is I’m getting this bloody restart; there’s no way I’m giving this win up,” adds Power, who was pressured by Romain Grosjean on the last two restarts at Indianapolis.
“I just focus hard on where I’m going to go and play a bit of a game to make sure I get a bit of a jump.”
He did that perfectly. And the quality of the drive shouldn’t be underestimated given what happened the weekend before, which I’d go as far as to call one of the worst days of his career. It’s not often any driver takes out two team-mates in one race.
In Nashville, first he clipped Simon Pagenaud into the wall at Turn 10 when the field was backing up at the restart, and then he dived Scott McLaughlin at Turn 9 spinning him around. Two Penske cars’ races ruined by another.
A little too much Power for Will Power.
The the second incident today for Will Power involving him and a teammate. #INDYCAR // @MusicCityGP // NBCSN pic.twitter.com/g5y0iGeIJH
— IndyCar on NBC (@IndyCaronNBC) August 8, 2021
Asked about the week following Nashville and if it was difficult, he replied: “Well, it was, yeah.
“Certainly the incident with McLaughlin was not good, and yeah, I didn’t see Roger [Penske] after the race a good hour there and said, ‘I need to win a race before I speak to him again’, so fortunately I came here and did that.
Power said he explained himself as best as he could to team president Tim Cindric. There is some context to add, as if Power hadn’t made the move on Pagenaud, other cars from behind likely would have tried it. The problem there was that there should have been a no overtake rule or gentleman’s agreement before the restart line.
Also, McLaughlin was on much older tyres when he left the door ajar at Turn 9. That didn’t mean Power had to lunge him, but for a split second Power thought McLaughlin was letting him past.
Anyway, stories are rife that Roger Penske does not tolerate his cars crashing into each other and indeed, it must have been a tricky week for Power.
In typical fashion the Indianapolis race was far from easy and even though he’d built a gap of over nine seconds, that was eroded when he caught backmarker James Hinchcliffe, who backed Power towards his Andretti Autosport team-mate – then second place driver Colton Herta.
He used this incident to make one of his regular complaints to the IndyCar officials. Power doesn’t like the rule where the pits close under caution and catch out the drivers who haven’t pitted. He also doesn’t like the no cooling under red flags rule, but this weekend most of all, he doesn’t like drivers racing to stay on the lead lap.
“When I got to him [Hinchcliffe] and I saw he was using Push-to-Pass to keep me behind, I’m like, it’s just insane that we have this in IndyCar,” Power complained.
“Even the second-place guy doesn’t like it, and the third-place guy, because if I get past him then they’ve got to work to get past him.
“It just ruins races.
“I don’t even think the guys that are trying to stay on the lead lap like it because they don’t want to be a pain in the ass.
Will Power enters and exits pit road right behind James Hinchcliffe!
That was close. @IndyCar x @IMS
📺: NBCSN
💻: https://t.co/T78I3Vpd2f pic.twitter.com/f9jsWvZ8gh— IndyCar on NBC (@IndyCaronNBC) August 14, 2021
“They would like to get out of the way, and it’s such a simple fix.
“Just bloody give them their lap back if it goes yellow. Give anyone who’s a lap down their lap back.
“It just blows my mind that we are at such a competitive series, you have nine different winners already, and no one consistently gets on pole, and it’s just a different polesitter every week, and yet you’ve got to come around and fight someone who’s the last guy.
“I mean, there’s no series in the world that does that.
“And we’ve asked for this [to change]. It pisses me off, man.
“Like it’s just crazy that you’re racing someone who’s a lap down, or going a lap down, it’s insane.
“Everyone works too hard, spends way too much money to be racing some guy that’s a lap down that’s having a bad day.”
Perhaps it was ironic that his win came on the anniversary of when he raised his middle fingers to officials for restarting a race at New Hampshire on a damp track, for which he was fined $30,000 at the time.
Anyway, there’s an excuse to mention the greatest IndyCar meme of all time. You know the one I mean.
Back to Power, and his frustrations show how much he still loves racing in this series at the age of 40, that he wants to improve it and that he wants to be the best in it.
Ultimately it’s another season lost for a driver capable of winning championships.
But you can’t help but admire his tenacity, he always comes back for more despite his woeful luck and inconsistency.
We’re the winners as we get to see one of the series’ most entertaining characters for another two seasons at least.
