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[h=2]Power's 2016 trial of will[/h] Mark Glendenning / Images by LAT

Will Power had no idea what was wrong with him when he flew into St. Petersburg for the opening race of the IndyCar season back in March. All he knew was that he felt like crap.



"It was a strange set of circumstances," he recalls. "When I turned up at St. Pete on the Thursday it looked like I had the mumps – my glands were out past my ears. You can probably find pictures of me on the pitstand, looking like I'm really fat. Then on the Friday night, when I was seeing double..."
He didn't feel any better the following day, and while the paddock swirled with chatter about what was ailing the 2014 series champion, Team Penske was focused on a more immediate question of whether he should even be in a race suit. It was a situation that was revisited on a session-by-session basis.
"I wasn't even sure if I could get in the car [for qualifying]," he says. "Tim Cindric said, 'Just go out, and if you don't feel it, come in.' As it turned out, I only did a total of four laps. Went out, did a lap, pitted, went out, did a lap, pitted, went out, did two laps, done."
Power qualified the car on pole, although those final couple of laps would be his last for the weekend: following another medical evaluation he was ruled out of the race.
Oriol Servia took over the No. 12 for Sunday, leaving Power to focus on trying to figure out why his body felt so terrible. Superficially, the symptoms – headache, vertigo, poor concentration – pointed to a concussion. There was even a smoking gun: Power had hit the wall during practice on Friday (below). But by that Monday, tests at the University of Miami had ruled concussion out, and blame temporarily shifted to an inner ear infection.
In a series as close as IndyCar, that St. Pete weekend should have stood as a terminal setback for one of the series' perennial title contenders. Winning the championship is hard enough without giving the rest of the field a one-race head start. And Pagenaud turned the screw even tighter by opening his own season with three wins and two second places from the first five races. Power managed just two top-fives during the same period.
Virtually nothing from the first third of Power's year can be found anywhere in the IndyCar title contender playbook, so the fact that he was able to overcome his health problems, reverse the slide, and emerge as Pagenaud's greatest threat at the end of the season stands as one of IndyCar 2016's great achievements. It's also the reason he was so comfortable with his bridesmaid status at the end of the Sonoma race.
"I've had much more frustrating ends to seasons than this, I can promise you," Power said immediately after Pagenaud secured the title.

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part 2
It's easy to see his point: four wins and second in the standings is absolutely more than he'd expected a few months earlier. The struggles at St. Pete were part of a broader fatigue problem that he'd been battling with before the season began, and even after he returned to the cockpit, the first few races were simply about trying to summon enough energy to drive the car. In that respect the DW12, which demands that its drivers muscle around a big, heavy pile of downforce without the benefit of power steering, was about the last thing that Power needed to be dealing with.
"At Phoenix [where he finished third], I was able to just sink into the car because it was all one direction, so I was able to conserve some energy at the beginning of that race," Power says.
"But for those first few races after St. Pete, I wasn't trying to do anything special or really trying to chase the points lead. I just thought, 'OK we're at a pretty big points deficit already,' and just went about trying to survive in the races and get to the finish."
Power had started feeling unwell during the winter, and while the underlying cause is still being investigated, the first symptoms emerged when he dived into an intense training program while still recovering from jetlag after a trip to Australia. His lack of conditioning through the opening races was not the result of too much sofa time. He simply couldn't train.
St. Petersburg was the nadir, but he says that he spent much of the first half of the season just trying to get through race weekends one session at a time.
"I can race with a broken hand, a broken anything," he says. "But dealing with having zero energy...it's the worst. If I had the choice of having zero energy and feeling like crap, or racing with a broken arm or something, I'll take having something broken every time. I raced at Toronto with a broken thumb the year before, and you just mentally switch it off. I remember that in practice it hurt like hell, but as soon as it got to qualifying I'd just switched it off. It didn't register. Until you stop, and then you've got a sore thumb.
"But the energy thing...when you don't have any energy you can't think right; you can't do anything. You're absolutely at the mercy of your body. "
Power says that he didn't even begin to consider the championship until the Indy road course. By then he'd made some progress up the table to seventh, although he still went into the weekend with less than half of Pagenaud's points total.
"The Indy road course was the first time when I thought, 'All right, I'm going to have to get a good result here if I want to be in this championship,'" he says. "And that absolutely didn't work out..."
A mistake in qualifying relegated Power to 10th on the grid, and prompting him to roll the dice and start on Firestone's harder-compound blacks. His misery was completed with a spin that dropped him to the rear of the field, setting him up for a self-described "horrible day."
Fitness was still an issue at that point, too. Power says that the Indy road course weekend was the first this year when he rolled out for the first practice session feeling something like his regular self, but by race day he was once again flagging badly.
"At the start of the Indy road course weekend I felt good," he says. "I really did. In practice I felt good, I think I felt good in qualifying, and then in the warm-up I was just so exhausted ... I remember thinking, 'How am I going to finish this race?' I was back to square one.
"And then by lap 15 ... oh my God, it was hard. I was absolutely toast. And that was running at the back of the field, mind you. Running at the back is much harder, physically, because you're constantly having to catch the car in turbulent air. When I finally got clean air, I definitely used less energy."

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part 3
While that race was another write-off from the season-revival standpoint, the freedom to drive the car unshackled by fatigue during the opening part of the weekend was his silver lining. Power continued making tiny adjustments to his everyday life as he worked toward reclaiming his old form – a tweak to his workout regime here; a change to his nutrition plan there, a bit of extra recovery whenever time allowed – and finally, he began to see progress. Although he continued to experience varying symptoms all the way through to Sonoma, he had things sufficiently under control, he finally started to feel like he was on his game once he got to the other side of the Indy 500.
"Detroit was [the first time] where it was, 'OK, I'm feeling pretty good here,'" he says. "I was chasing the leaders down in the first race and the first time [this year] where I really felt, 'Wow, I can push here, keep with these guys, go a lap longer,' or whatever I needed to do.
"I obviously didn't have the fitness that I had the previous year, just because I wasn't able to work out. But as the year went on I was able to get car fitness, and the best thing that happened was those two weeks off before Pocono. That gave me a chance to get out, get a bit of exercise, do some cycling, and that actually felt really good."
Power is accustomed to being a part of the championship conversation right from the opening race but this time, his early season struggles cast him in the unfamiliar role of pursuer. And while his battle to understand and solve his flagging energy was complicated enough, he also had to find an answer to Pagenaud's early run of form.
"I remember thinking that having my own streak like the one that Simon had would be the only way I'd ever get back into the championship," he says. "And then I actually did."
In fact, Power's golden patch was slightly better than his teammate's, in that he was able to stretch his second-or-better streak to six races between Sunday at Detroit and Pocono. And while he was making something out of nothing, his cause was further helped by Pagenaud entering a minor mid-season slump.
"At first I wasn't worried [about Power]", Pagenaud said after the season was over. "But at Toronto he started to become a problem".
The Australian won at Detroit (Sunday), Road America, Toronto and Pocono, and felt that he should have added Mid-Ohio to the list as well.
"I kicked myself over the restart at Mid-Ohio," he says. "It was such a bad mistake when you know you've got the win in your hands; to be asleep on a restart and not absolutely on it. I never should have gotten into the situation of having to battle [eventual winner Pagenaud] like that.

"But it was just a fantastic streak. It really was. Very good strategy calls, and running up at the front to take advantage of it ... it got us right back in there."
Power's good fortune didn't last. A Charlie Kimball-assisted crash at Watkins Glen was a huge setback on the championship front, and also put him back into the medical spotlight when he was forced to undergo evaluation for another suspected concussion. Despite renewed speculation over whether he'd be cleared to race at Sonoma, he says that he was never in doubt that he'd be on the grid for the finale.
"It was just a routine thing," he says. "One of the medical people – it wasn't even one of the IndyCar medical people – said, 'We saw you on the camera and you looked wobbly, so you're going to have to do a SCAT test.' And then I did the SCAT test and didn't pass it, for whatever reason. It's hard, once you get out of a racecar, to be balanced anyway."
Power arrived at Sonoma needing a perfect weekend, and some sort of catastrophe to strike Pagenaud's side of the garage. As history now records, he didn't get either of them: Pagenaud qualified on pole and was untouchable in the race, and Power was torpedoed by a gearbox problem. Afterward, though, he was cheerily fatalistic about the outcome.
"When it's your year to win a championship, it's your year," he said. "It was just Simon's year through and through. Everything fell well for him. He did the things he needed to do – this weekend he got pole, led the laps, made it as difficult as possible for me. He just did a great job."
And that's it. None of the regret that has colored some of Power's other championship near-misses. No off-season riddled with sleepless nights spent replaying that one moment during that one race where he might have done something differently. (Although with a baby on the way, sleepless nights will feature heavily during his winter regardless).
Power faced two major rivals this year: his own body, and Pagenaud. He mostly overcame the former, and came close enough to overcoming the latter to cause a few anxious moments in Camp Simon. What could a fully healthy Power have achieved this year? In 2017, we might find out.

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senor honda

INDYCAR: Power muscles way to Dual 2 win

Robin Miller / Images by LAT


In June 2016, After somehow losing Saturday’s opening round of Dual in Detroit despite dominating qualifying and much of the race, Team Penske made good on its second chance Sunday afternoon.

Will Power, mired in a 19-race winless streak that started after last May’s Angie’s List Grand Prix, came to life and made a ballsy outside pass of teammate Simon Pagenaud on lap 52 – it was for fifth at the time, but that turned out to be the difference as they finished 1-2 in Roger Penske’s second-favorite track.
Power held off polesitter Pagenaud by less than a second to score his first victory in over a year and 26th of his career to tie Rodger Ward for 14th place on the all-time IndyCar list. It was Power's third top-5 this season (he finished third at Phoenix and fourth at Barber).
“Man, it’s been a long time and we really needed this,” said Power, who started eighth in his Verizon Chevy and took the lead for good on lap 61. “My guys did a great job of getting me out ahead of Ryan (Hunter-Reay) on my last pit stop and then I stuck it on the outside to get Simon on that last restart. “It wasn’t a big risk because it was on the outside. But there was a space and I went for it.”
Pagenaud, who now owns three wins, three runner-up finishes and an 80-point lead in the standings over Scott Dixon, marveled at his teammate’s move.
“Will made a great pass and had to brake really late," he said. "I was struggling on cold tires and he made a helluva move. I got beat.”
Pagenaud pushed his teammate to the checkered flag and lost by 0.9203 seconds but increased his points lead in the Verizon series to 80 over Dixon and 86 over teammate Helio Castroneves.
Ryan Hunter-Reay was third, Josef Newgarden fourth and Scott Dixon fifth. Sebastien Bourdais, winner of Dual 1, finished eighth.
It appeared that a different Penske driver would be standing in victory lane until Castroneves got a bad break. After making a nifty outside-in move to pass Pagenaud for the lead on lap 41, Castroneves was out in front of Pagenaud, Hunter-Reay and Power when everything turned. That trio ducked into the pits on lap 49 but Castroneves stayed out after a late call by Roger Penske and then a full-course yellow flew on lap 50 for the stalled car of Jack Hawksworth.
The three-time Indy winner screamed into his radio because he knew the chance of him winning for the first time since Belle Isle in 2014 was toast. When he pitted on lap 51, he rejoined the race in 16th place and ended up finishing 14th.


“Helio got real unlucky with the yellow today because he had the race in hand,” said Power, who moved into seventh in the point standings despite missing the season opener.
Hunter-Reay started second in his DHL Honda and finished third to salvage a rough weekend for Andretti Autosport.
“It feels good to be on the podium and I drove as hard as I could," Hunter-Reay said, "but nobody seemed to have anything for Team Penske this weekend.”
Josef Newgarden bounced back from a tough Saturday with a fourth place in the Preferred Freezer Chevy, Conor Daly had another strong result for Dale Coyne by charging from 21st to sixth in the Byrd’s Hospitality Honda.
An opening-lap incident on the first corner (left) took out James Hinchcliffe and rookie Max Chilton after Charlie Kimball squeezed Carlos Munoz, who sent Hinchcliffe into the wall. Both Hinchcliffe and Chilton would not be able to continue. Takuma Sato and Marco Andretti also sustained damage but were able to continue.
It was also an eventful race for Power's teammate Juan Pablo Montoya. He ran into the back of Scott Dixon in Turn 7 on lap 23, damaging Montoya's front-wing assembly and giving Dixon a flat tire. His race ended after his lap 34 pit stop after he hit the wall in Turn 8 and spun into the Turn 10 barrier. Montoya wound up in 20th.
"Helio (Castroneves) just smashed into us on the start and put us into the wall," Dixon said. "We lost a ton of track position after that. I didn't see the replay with the contact with Juan [Pablo Montoya] but I tried to give him room while getting to the corner. That obviously gave us a puncture and dropped us a ways back. But after the hit I took from Helio at the start I could turn right pretty well, but I just couldn't turn left and it's hard to move up in the race obviously like that."
Power became the sixth different winner in eight races in 2016 as the circuit heads to Texas this Saturday night.