When Will Power made his U.S. open-wheel debut with Walker Racing in the penultimate round of the 2005 Champ Car season, it was as a third entry for the team alongside incumbents Alex Tagliani and Marcus Marshall.
For 2006, as Power replaced Marshall and joined Tagliani, Team Australia was able to capture Brandon Fry, from the redoubtable RuSPORT team to become Power’s race engineer for his first full season at this level, and the pair made strong progress. From the middle of the season, the Aussie rookie took over from Tag as the team’s ‘cutting edge’, closing out the year with pole at Surfers Paradise, his first podium finish at Mexico City, a well-deserved Rookie of the Year title and sixth in the championship.
However, Fry then headed to Forsythe Championship Racing to engineer Paul Tracy in 2007, and Walker cast around for a replacement. He grabbed 27-year-old New Jersey native Dave Faustino, who had run Andrew Ranger, then Charles Zwolsman at Conquest Racing. The Power-Faustino combo won first time out with the new Panoz DP01-Cosworth in Las Vegas, would add a further win on the rainy streets of Toronto, and finished the season fourth in the championship, and with five pole positions.
When Walker Racing went under during the Champ Car / Indy Racing League merger as the Aussie Vineyards sponsorship migrated to KV Racing, Power and Faustino had to make the same move. Yet by the end of ’08, that same source of funding had dried up altogether, obliging KV to seek pay drivers for ’09 and Power to look elsewhere. Faustino stayed at KV, running Mario Moraes.
But then, as has become famous now, Team Penske asked Power to fill in for Helio Castroneves during the latter’s tax trial, and were so impressed with him that they gave him occasional outings in a third entry that year. He scored two poles, one win and two further podiums in his six outings. After recovering from his broken back, incurred in a crash when a car spun in front of him over a blind crest at Sonoma, Penske signed up Power full time and team president Tim Cindric asked him what he’d think of Faustino race engineering him in this third full-time entry. Will tried to hide his enthusiasm, but said yes, Dave would fit in just fine.
They’ve been together ever since, each trying to deny they are brothers from different mothers, that it’s their similar glass-half-empty outlooks that make the full glass and drives them on with such intensity. Their relationship has helped produce 40 of Will’s 41 victories and 65 of his record-breaking 68 pole positions. And now they have two championships together.
We caught up with Faustino after he had allowed himself a whole two days off.
DML: Is it true that you and Will were debriefing on stage after the Laguna Seca race – the finale?!
DF: Yeah… force of habit! There’s always the inclination to figure out right away what we could have done better, and whenever the races are back to back, you change your focus so quick to the next event, but you still need to be taking notes on the event just gone because you want to turn up there at next year’s race and still be quick.
No doubt at Laguna Seca it was about the tires. Performance variance between tire sets has become a hot topic in IndyCar among drivers and engineers over the last season-and-a-half: I think Will feels it contributed to his poor qualifying at Barber and Road America. Would you agree?
Yeah, we see that from time to time and it’s hard to quantify. I hear it in the paddock. I have to say though, mostly we don’t feel that’s a regular problem. But we felt it a little bit in the race at Laguna Seca in those middle stints compared with the last stint.
So let’s rewind eighth months. Will decided at the start of the year to think ‘big picture’, focus on the championship, to keep banking on the sure thing rather than gamble. Was that a policy you could get behind and were you part of the decision-making process?
Maybe from some aspects. We’ve known for a while, when you look at how championships are won, if you can average a finish of fifth or better, then you’re going to have a pretty good shot at winning, so I think everybody tries to have that consistency and average a top five. And I wouldn’t say that we changed that in 2022, I think we’ve always tried for that consistency.
But maybe what has changed is Will’s attitude, his satisfaction with a result that is in that realm. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, we just need to get on the podium or get a top five’, but if you finish a race fourth or third when you started from pole, are you really happy with it? Can you move on from that with a positive mindset? He could, and I think that was really the big difference with Will this year, and he verbalized with the crew his happiness about podiums. In years past, if he started on pole and finished only third or fourth, he would have been very unhappy. This season, he really was single-minded about that championship and adopted the right attitude for that. It wasn’t a different planned approach, but a different mindset.
So in the fourth round at Barber, Will started 19th but finished fourth and top Penske, which meant he had one third and three fourths in the first four races, whereas his teammates [Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin] had won three of those four races. He was OK with that?
Yeah, I think so. Any time you can have a recovery drive like that, it keeps you in the hunt. I can’t remember where we were in the championship [fourth but only 10 points off the lead], but we were in that cluster at the front. We had banked points. Maybe it felt different after the 500, because we went into it leading the points [after another third place in the GP of Indy] but came out of it having dropped [to fourth] and we had no way of knowing if [Indy 500 winner] Marcus Ericsson was going to continue to be consistent.
But in general, yeah, we were pretty satisfied with how the points were building up. The series is so competitive now, you have to come into it knowing that there isn’t going to be one guy who runs away with it. Josef had that potential – five wins – but in between he had bad days, too. We had made certain assumptions going into the season, that it was more likely than not going to be Josef and [Scott] Dixon who were our main rivals, and so if we were doing OK relative to them, we were happy.
It’s as if Will took on board what Ganassi drivers preached for years – it’s about making your bad days as good as possible. If Will hadn’t dug so hard after stalling in the pits at the 500 – had gotten only 20th instead of 15th – that’s 12 points gone missing in a double-points race. And Road America; if he’d been hit harder by DeFrancesco, if that had ended his race and he’d posted first retirement, that’s another six points lost. That would have meant Newgarden was now champ.
Yeah, and Nashville too. After Will got hit up the back, he didn’t have automated gearshift for the rest of the race. He had to lift for every upshift, had to blip the throttle for every downshift, and it made us just tragic on the straights! But his experience got him through. If we’d retired when he got hit, that’s another dozen or so points gone. Instead he survived all the other attrition and chaos and limped it home [11th]; he did what he could, so that was a big result in the circumstances. We made a bad day as good as it could be.
Even if your performance is good, you can’t guarantee good qualifying these days. With the tires’ peak performance being in such a small time window and how much traffic is out there, it’s extremely hard to just execute laps at the right time, when the tires are at their best. And if you find yourself near the back of pitlane because of bad qualifying in the previous race, you get this snowball effect. If you roll out of pitlane with nine cars ahead of you, and the eight ahead are all trying to get their gaps, so they’re backing up and backing up on a track which is maybe only two miles long or less, then you have to hang back as well, which means you’re going slow so it’s hard to then get heat in the tires… We’re not a special case – it’s the same for everyone – but I’m just explaining how tough it is.
Will, Rick Mears, and others have said in 2022 he was much quicker at calming down after setbacks. Do you agree?
Yeah, I’d say so. His re-focus for the next next session was always good. My comment earlier about greater levels of satisfaction from non-wins was true about the races. In qualifying, I think the pressure of trying to beat Mario Andretti’s all-time pole record meant Will was dissatisfied as ever if he qualified poorly, especially if he felt he didn’t reach the car’s full potential. Being satisfied with second or third in qualifying as he was in the race was absolutely not going to happen! If he messed up a lap when the tires were at their best, or if something held us up in qualifying, like yellow flags or red flags or another car, Will was definitely still angry. There would still be some yelling.
But to your point, yes, he was better at getting over that stuff and getting on with the job. He wrestled with the reality that if you do have a bad quali, you think, ‘Well it can only get better from here’. And look at the stats – how often does the polesitter win these races? [Only twice in 17 races in 2022.]
Mid-Ohio, I think, was a definite giveaway of a pole and victory in what I’ll euphemistically describe as admin disorganization in the pits, although Will thought he might have won even from the back if he hadn’t been ‘thinking championship’. He also cited St. Pete and Iowa 2 as potential wins that fell victim to his big picture view of the season. Were there any other races that stand out to you as ones that got away?
Hmm… Well I’d agree with those ones, but I think also the first Indy road course race that ended in rain. After being on pole, I think maybe we could have done better than third. And Nashville – we certainly had more potential, for at least a podium, if he hadn’t been nursing damage. I think our three cars were the best, and none of us got the right result.
As far as planning and debriefings go, is Will the same dedicated guy you first encountered with Walker Racing back in 2007?
Yeah, although with so much experience, things do change. Back then, Will was learning the cars – we both were. But with how long we’ve had this chassis [since 2012] you just know what everything on the car does, to some degree. What’s changed in the series is that there’s no single setting on the car any more, it’s a complete philosophy, so Will’s changed from trying to make a single setting change on a car to improve it; he appreciates that it leads to a combination of things, and how he’ll have to change his driving style accordingly.
If you turn up at a racetrack with the wrong setup philosophy, you’re immediately on the back foot. You have to show up already having decided what you’re going to look at and how the driver might want to work on driving-wise because there’s not a lot of practice time compared with what we used to have.
So yes, Will’s dedicated as ever, but we’re working on different things now.
Given your aforementioned experience with the car, and your 15 year partnership, it is still possible to miss, setup-wise?
Oh yeah. The thing is, there’s slight changes to the tires each year, slight changes to the racetracks, and there’s always temperature changes to deal with. The things that happened to the car when the track temp got hot, say, four years ago, aren’t necessarily the same as what happens now when it gets hot. And even year-to-year it can change, maybe due to tire compounds. You can have a setup philosophy that’s worked for years and then you show up and it’s not competitive, and maybe that’s because others have caught up or found a different way of tackling the track. And it’s how quickly you acknowledge that, and pivot your focus, and change your setup that can make the difference in how you perform that weekend. For example, we turned up at St. Pete and Long Beach this weekend and things were so different – St. Pete was very rubbered up, and Long Beach was more gripped up than we had ever seen. Luckily we reacted as a team very quickly.
How useful was it to have a fully up-to-speed Scott McLaughlin/Ben Bretzman combo on the #3?
Oh yeah, very helpful. We saw glimpses of Scott’s speed and potential the year before, but we didn’t know how soon he would be able to put a whole event together, and he was able to do that from the very first race this year. So huge credit to Scott and Ben and the whole #3 group for that. It’s very encouraging for the whole team, given how young he is.
I find it very interesting to have Scott in the debriefs – someone who has so little open-wheel experience – because he has an untainted perspective. You know, the rest of us may have some bias because we’ve been in IndyCar a long time – “Oh that’ll never work, we tried that at Mid-Ohio in 2009 and it sucked!” – and you try it again now and it’s actually great. So not having that bias is great.
Will, Josef and Scott all have their quirks, they don’t all like the same setup changes, but there’s a general unity in what they want. There’s some aspects of driving where Will is more like Josef and some where Will and Scott are closer, but if you can blend those two with the ideas you have of your own, it’s great. It’s awesome to have two really good teammates; and it’s easier to manage three rather than four like we had in recent years.
I’ve now been here a long time, and there’s a couple of years that stand out to me where we had very cohesive groups that worked together well as a team, and this year ranked right up there.
Is Will as quick as he ever was?
Pfff… that’s hard to say without seeing Will 2007 race against Will 2022! Drivers and teams have evolved. But does Will have the capability to be on pole almost every race? Yes. Is that the measure? Yeah, maybe. So I think you should say yes until proven otherwise.
Is it more work to get those poles? Yes! But is that a reflection on it getting harder to find speed, or is it more a reflection on the caliber of the teams and drivers throughout the field? It’s difficult to judge those factors. So I’ll say it’s harder work than ever to be as fast as we want to be, relative to the rest of the field, but that’s a function of the series.
Is he still capable of delivering performances that no other driver could do? I’d cite Detroit because of that amazing charge from 16th to first in 14 laps, then gapping the field, and then that final stint when he showed how quick he could go while nursing fragile tires.
Yeah, that was pretty awesome, it really was. And then the second Indy road course race, where Will finished Lap 2 down in 17th because of a Turn 1 incident and then getting divebombed on the next lap. We had to come up with a new strategy, but the only way it could work was if he got a much better fuel number / lap time ratio than we’d ever anticipated. When it comes to doing that stuff, Will is still very impressive. To get a podium out of that…
There’s a couple of races each season when he has the opportunity to show these skills and even now, after 15 years with him, I still think, ‘Damn, that’s special.’
So Will’s delivered the second championship, and he said it was for the #12 group and crew members who’d gone through his rollercoaster of the previous seven years. Are we now going to see him return to being the Will Power who tries to win the championship by winning everything?
I wish I knew the answer to that question! I’m not sure I’ll know until a few races into the season next year. And having now beaten Mario’s pole record, will that affect how he approaches qualifying? I don’t know. Hmm… yeah, it’s a difficult one to predict.
But I certainly don’t think it will affect his initial approach to the year. I think a conservative opening to the season, banking points and podiums at least until Indy, is always a good approach.
Presuming Team Penske are on the frontline for testing the new Chevrolet 2.4 and hybrid unit for 2024, how will that get dealt with while also trying to keep up the momentum with the current car for 2023?
I can’t say with a 100 percent certainty how that’s going to go because test dates and programs for that car aren’t fully laid out yet. In an ideal world we’ll set some resource aside dedicated to 2024, but we know we’ve got to make further improvements at Indy. That’s Roger’s priority. This year we made big gains on where we were in qualifying in 2021, but we need to make the same gains again for ’23, so we’re going to hit that pretty hard. And we have things in the pipeline for this car at road and street courses, too.
The rest have been warned...
