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."