[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.