IndyCar points leader Will Power most confident he’s ever been heading into title showdown in Fontana!
EXCLUSIVE BLOG: TEAM PENSKE DRIVER EXPECTS TO BE STRONG IN SEASON’S FINAL THREE RACES
Yeah, here we go. We have three races remaining in the Verizon IndyCar Series season, and our No. 12 Verizon Team Penske Chevrolet team leads the points over my teammate, Helio Castroneves, as well as Ryan Hunter-Reay and Simon Pagenaud.
I’m watching last year’s race from Milwaukee as I write this, just having a bit of a look to refresh the memory. The Milwaukee Mile is a good place to race, a good place for Indy cars. It’s a lot of fun, and we were pretty good there last year, finishing third. It’s fun to race there because you’re lifting, and car setup means a lot; some cars are quick at different stages of the race, so it makes for good racing.
I only lead Helio by four points in the championship. For most of this year, I said I wasn’t going to worry too much about points and instead just be aggressive and try to get the best results possible, and that’s what we did. But obviously, at this point, it’s about finishing ahead of the three guys behind me in the championship, which is more on the strategy side of things, so you just have to take it as it comes. You look at the situation and you race how you race, but you probably don’t take a big risk and put yourself in a bad situation.
Helio is by far the closest to me right now in the fight, with Hunter-Reay 63 points behind and Pagenaud 64 behind. But with the last race, on the superspeedway in Fontana, Calif., being for double points, there will probably still be three or four guys in contention at the finale. So you just do your own thing, put your head down and focus on what you can control.
I was just saying to someone the other night, this has definitely been a strange season where you’ve seen guys, including me, get hot, have a good run or a few good runs, then have a bad run or two. But it actually makes sense, considering the competition in IndyCar these days. You’re not going to see someone winning every race, you’re not going to see someone qualifying on pole every week. It’s the type of series now where there is no dominant force. I mean, the last race, Mid-Ohio, was a good run for us -- and that was a sixth place! But I definitely want to win another race before the end of the season. And hey, if we can win all three, then we don’t have to worry about anything!
Autoweek’s motorsports editor, Mac Morrison, asked me the other day if any of the championship contenders have been talking trash to each other. That made me laugh, actually! As competitive as we all are, as all race drivers are, there hasn’t been any trash talk at all! Maybe that’s surprising and it would be kind of funny, but no. I think that would definitely be putting yourself in a bad situation because karma is a … well, you know.
The same goes for within Team Penske, even though the guy sitting across from me in the engineering room is one of the guys I need to beat. That’s just the way it is, and Helio’s been around a long time. And it’s not too much in his nature to be that way either, so everything seems normal. We still have to share information -- that’s just the way the team works -- so we accept it and focus on the things we can control. The rest will take care of itself, whatever that may be.
For me, this is the first time I’ve gone into the end of the season feeling this confident that I’ve done well on the tracks we’re about to visit. I feel good on the ovals; obviously, I feel very good at Sonoma. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind about it like there may have been in the past going into the final races. I have no doubt that if I do the right job, I can absolutely nail it.
The way the series is, though, it’s not as easy as that. You can’t overlook anyone now, week in, week out. There’s seriously not a single driver who you can just say, oh, don’t worry about him. There just isn’t. Look at Sebastien Bourdais, for example. We’ve had some clashes during the past couple of years, but look at his performances lately and it’s not difficult to see that team and Bourdais becoming title contenders next season. He’s definitely back to his old form, and there’s nothing like the confidence a win can give you. I can definitely see him being super strong the rest of this year and definitely going into next year, looking like the Bourdais of old. And then we’ve got my other teammate, Juan Pablo Montoya. Now there’s most definitely another guy poised to be a threat from the start of next season. So yeah, I think it’s going to be pretty amazing next year.
Really man, it’s amazing already. IndyCar is definitely one of the most competitive open-wheel series in the world. Look at Mid-Ohio: The whole field during practice was covered by six-tenths of a second. It’s just ridiculous and unbelievable. It’s good racing, man, and there’s not a single person that’s not competitive. I hope it remains that way, too. Winning races and contending for championships in such a strong field means just that much more, and that’s exactly what the Verizon Team Penske guys and I are about to try and pull off.
