Will Power breaks through with Indianapolis 500 win
INDIANAPOLIS — Will Power said headed into Sunday he had just one more box to check on his IndyCar career, and that was winning the Indianapolis 500. Check. “On the white-flag lap, I started screaming because I just knew I was going to win it,” Power said. “Unbelievable. I’ve never been so excited.”
It was career win No. 34 (tying Al Unser Jr. on the all-time list) for the 37-year-old Power, the first Australian to win the world’s most prestigious race. It allowed him to hand team owner Roger Penske his 17th Indy 500 victory, far and away the record, and the team’s 201st IndyCar victory three weeks after gaining No. 200 in the IndyCar Grand Prix on the road course here.
Do the math: He now has four wins at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Power smiled at that thought.
But he knows the 500 victory supersedes all others with Penske, whose IndyCar shop in Mooresville, North Carolina, is decorated solely by large posters celebrating the team’s previous 16 Indy 500 winners.
“I’ve looked at that often and wanted to be up there,” Power said. “Yeah, it’s going to be pretty cool to walk in that shop and see yourself up there in victory lane from the Indy 500.”
Penske, 81, will see to it. Indy has had special meaning to him since he first came here as a kid “in 1951. I guess something bit me. I can never get rid of it for so many years.”
The itch only heightened Sunday. He’d just watched Power, starting third on the front row, hound pole-sitter Ed Carpenter through the first half of the race. Power took control during a pit stop cycle on lap 108, then watched as three drivers — Rahal Letterman Lanigan’s Oriol Servia and Stefan Wilson and Meyer Shank Racing’s Jack Harvey — tried to turn a fuel-stretching strategy into a win, only to see Power take the lead for good with four laps to go.
“He won this race today because he was the best,” Penske said, and he referred to the whole Team Penske ef-
fort that included team manager Jon Bouslog, president Tim Cindric and the crew.
As Penske said, they prepped “four bullets,” including for Simon Pagenaud, who finished sixth, Josef Newgarden, who was eighth, and three-time 500 winner Helio Castroneves, who crashed out on lap 146.
In the slippery conditions on the 91-degree day, Castroneves’ was one of six single-car crashes that included 2013 500 winner Tony Kanaan and Danica Patrick, who made her last racing start. There were seven caution periods in all, the first when defending race winner Takuma Sato collided with suddenly slow-moving James Davison on lap 48.
But it was Kanaan’s crash that set up the final restart with eight laps left. Power was fourth in line behind Servia, Wilson and Harvey. Wilson and Harvey got past Servia immediately, and Power did a couple of laps later. Then going through turn four with four laps to go, Power saw Wilson and Harvey suddenly duck into the pits for fuel.
“It’s like the gates opened,” Power said. “It was amazing. Just full rich (on the fuel mixture), go, go, hold on.”
The man who had low regard for oval racing when he started with the team 11 years ago has grown to like it so much, he said, that “I feel like every time I go to an oval I have a chance to win.”
Then Sunday he did it on the granddaddy of ovals, beating Carpenter to the line by 3.1589 seconds. So yes, he screamed.
“Obviously, I screamed a lot,” Power said. “I just lost my head.”