The 2022 IndyCar Series was touted by many – not least ourselves – as the stage for the coronation of a powerful youth movement led by champion Álex Palou, Colton Herta, and Pato O’Ward. Naturally, when the season ended Sunday at Laguna Seca Raceway, it was 41-year-old veteran Will Power who defied all of that reasoning and became a two-time champion in the highest level of American single-seater racing.
Wait, what? Will Power, the same man who came off the worst season of his career since he joined Team Penske in 2009? The same driver whose early-season struggles kept him from being a championship factor for several years, and whose ultimate upside should have been no more than an obligatory late-season victory?
The same uncompromising, fiery driver prone to emotional outbursts when things don’t go his way – chief among them, his infamous two-finger gesture directed towards former race director Brian Barnhart after the farcical 2011 New Hampshire race? That Will Power?
It’s true: Power now has one championship for each of those middle digits on his hands, and it was because of a well-documented shift in attitude and approach for the senior driver of the Penske team.
“From the beginning, it was just playing the long game,” Power said in his post-race interview. “I said it to [Team Penske President] Tim Cindric, I just said, ‘Man, I’m just playing the long game this year, not necessarily going for the big wins and all that.’
“In the past I would have been really pissed off. When your team mates are winning – that was a big change, it’s like, ‘I don’t care. I’m going to weather their storm while they’re having a good run.’ That in itself was a mental change. It’s like, I’m not getting pissed off with a top four, where before I would have been after the race, just seething.”
Power opened up about his new, calmer attitude many times early in the season, and many within the Penske organisation – Cindric, managing director Ron Ruzewski, even the legendary Rick Mears (a Penske advisor) can all corroborate that this wasn’t just a gimmick spawned from a hot start to the season.
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There were moments that tested Power’s new-found patience, for sure. He wasn’t much pleased with rookie Devlin DeFrancesco after being spun out early at Road America, but their conflict never escalated beyond a car-to-car tap on the…
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