An inglorious end to a glorious partnership

On Sep 4, 2025

An era has ended: Will Power, who over the last 17 years has become synonymous with the No. 12 Verizon Team Penske-Chevrolet will next season pilot the No. 26 Andretti Global-Honda. The team/driver combination that yielded two IndyCar Series championships, 42 wins (including an Indy 500) and 65 poles is no more. And while there hasn’t been any public mordancy between Power and his erstwhile employer – each party is grateful for their successes, and certainly Will won’t forget Roger Penske’s support at certain crisis points in his career and life – nor has the parting been harmonious…

Why? Because it seems to have little basis in logic. And behind all the fervor and fight, passion and perseverance, Will Power is a logical man. Being cut loose just doesn’t compute.

And to think, just a few years ago, Power thought his retirement from the cockpit might include the chance to take over where Rick Mears left off, as a driver adviser for America’s most legendary team. That bright idea gradually dimmed over the past couple of seasons, as he gave his considerable all, and with tangible results – he was, to my mind, the best IndyCar driver of 2024 – yet was proffered no new contract. Yes, he recognizes it’s Team Penske’s right to choose its driver lineup, but he has excelled over the past two seasons, so the lack of dialogue over a new contract and the unspoken assumption that he would retire when the team decreed was both puzzling and hurtful.

Finally, soon after his brilliant Portland victory, Power received a call summoning him to Penske HQ in Detroit. There was an offer – for a single additional season. Mentally it jarred, given that he won a race in a difficult season for the team and has been Penske’s best driver this year and last, more often than not. But it also felt as if the team had set Will’s ‘use by’ date and, since he hadn’t obligingly decided to retire, had instead figured he’d either drop off in pace next year, justifying the team dispensing with him, and/or make him less appealing to Penske’s principal rivals.

What Penske planned to do if Will had taken this 2026 offer, we may never know. Would RP have been prepared to run four cars – for Josef Newgarden, Scott McLaughlin, the incoming (we assume) David Malukas and Power – despite only three cars per team being granted the $1.2m Leaders Circle money from IndyCar? Would there have been a supposedly joint entry from Penske and its current technical partner A.J. Foyt Racing? Or would Power have remained in the No. 12 and Malukas spent another season at Foyt?

It’s a moot point. Power decided not to fly to Motown, instead informing Penske that he wouldn’t be returning to the team. And… that was it. An inglorious end to a glorious partnership.

But how on earth did he ever come to be on Penske’s discard pile?

Power, of course, won his second IndyCar championship in 2022, but following an off-season in which his beloved wife Elizabeth nearly died, his 2023 campaign was rough. As well as the increased time he put into being a home-maker, shouldering a greater part of the responsibility of bringing up their son Beau as well as tending to Liz, he’ll admit his head wasn’t as in the game as often as it had been in all previous seasons. He was asking himself unanswerable questions – primarily, should he even be partaking in a dangerous sport when his wife’s health was teetering? He bluntly admitted his dread of Beau being left an orphan. Muscle memory meant Will’s driving was still good that year – he took a couple of poles and four podiums and finished seventh in the championship – but it had lost some of its traditional bite because he was arriving at tracks with a tumult of other, far more important thoughts tugging for his attention. For the first time since his rookie Champ Car campaign of 2006, Power went a season without a victory.

To those within the team who didn’t know everything going on in his private life, it appeared that its most dependable driver, now the wrong side of 40 years old, had given his all to win that ’22 championship, then the adrenaline had dropped and he might now be starting a decline. To others who knew the facts but have an underdeveloped empathy gene, it was an opportunity to capitalize on Power’s travails and cast around for a cheaper replacement for when his contract expired at the end of ’25.

They underestimated him. This was a man who had recovered from a broken back while a Penske part-timer in 2009 to become the team’s cutting edge. And after narrowly missing out on the IndyCar title in 2010, ’11 and ’12, he had dug deep in his reserve of resolve to end 2013 on a high and carry that momentum all the way to the 2014 championship. The bounceback in ’12 had also been particularly admirable given that he was one of the 15 drivers eliminated in the hideous chain-reaction incident at Las Vegas Motor Speedway that claimed the life of Dan Wheldon in the 2011 finale. The No. 12 Penske had taken off from the back of another car, banked into a lurid flight toward the catchfencing, and only good fortune in trajectory and a wheel tether had prevented him suffering, at the very least, a life-changing injury. Power did, however, fracture his spine for a second time.

From ’15 through ’21, he was a regular winner, and triumphed in the Indianapolis 500 in 2018. Power’s failure to capture more championships in this period was a result more of misfortune and/or the team letting him down than of driving slip-ups. For example, it took forever for Penske to assemble a pitcrew for the No. 12 that could consistently match the best of Ganassi, and as the IndyCar field tightened up, the least time spent on pitlane became almost as crucial as not sending a car out of the pits with only three wheels securely fitted.

Power opened the Penske chapter of his career as a stand-in for Helio Castroneves at St Petersburg in 2009, finishing sixth. He adopted his trademark No.12 at the following race. Darrell Ingham/Getty Images

Also notable is that Power’s competitiveness remained absolute, whatever changes were made to IndyCar’s formula, and that certainly isn’t something that can be said of all drivers. There are at least two title contenders who were blunted when IndyCar abandoned the downforce-laden aerokits at the end of 2017, and two more who were confounded by the new weight distribution of the cars once the aeroscreens were added.

Power’s open-mindedness and adaptability in such circumstances has been revealed in other ways. For instance, he’s always been open to learning from championship-caliber teammates – he never has been a driver who thought he knew it all, nor assumed that his way was always the best way. So to become more formidable, he assimilated what he observed working alongside Helio Castroneves, Ryan Briscoe, Simon Pagenaud, Juan Pablo Montoya, Newgarden and McLaughlin, and applied anything that would make him a better driver. Will would also be the first to admit that he also learned how to approach a championship quest by watching his rivals from other teams, such as Chip Ganassi Racing’s Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon and most recently, Alex Palou, and he always admired the bravery and speed of peak-form Ryan Hunter-Reay.

Even as late as 2021, Will recognized he would have to change his philosophy in qualifying – not an area he had ever struggled before! – because he tended to abandon hot laps as soon as he made a slight error, in order to save his tires for a second shot. What dawned on him was that all his rivals make errors, too, and his might be less than theirs, so press on through, complete the lap.

Which is why he scored five poles in 2022. Sure, he took only one win but there should have been three or four more, and he was strong on all tracks. That consistency is what produced the second championship. For reasons explained already, 2023 was a disappointment, but as the saying goes, form is temporary while class is permanent. His 2024 season would prove that.

Last year, he not only scored three wins, he was also Alex Palou’s most consistent threat throughout the season. Sure, his spin at Milwaukee and detached seatbelt at Nashville allowed Colton Herta and teammate McLaughlin to bump him down to fourth in the final points standings. But race in, race out, Power was the driver whom Palou and the No. 10 Ganassi team had watched warily. He had also been the only one of the Penske drivers to emerge from the St. Petersburg overboost cheating debacle with his reputation unsullied and without a stain on his conscience, which made him popular even among the anti-Penske fans, a gro up that had noticeably swollen in number.

Meanwhile, Malukas had endured a truly weird 2024. After having an edge over veteran teammate Takuma Sato in his rookie season of ’22, and remaining at Dale Coyne Racing in ’23 to blow away newcomer Sting Ray Robb, he had looked particularly good on short ovals, notching up podiums at WWTR as both a rookie and then a sophomore. He was signed by Arrow McLaren for ’24, to join incumbents Pato O’Ward and Alexander Rossi, and replace Felix Rosenqvist. But a hand injury incurred in the off-season, and the lack of a definite timeline as to when it might recover, prompted McLaren to sever its ties with the young Chicagoan. So Malukas returned to action at Round 9, Laguna Seca, driving for Meyer Shank Racing, replacing part-owner Helio Castroneves who had briefly been pressed into service subbing for the very talented but inexplicably struggling Tom Blomqvist.

Ironically, that meant Malukas found himself partnering the very driver he had been due to replace at McLaren, Rosenqvist. Only Malukas himself knows how much his sore hand affected his performances, but third place on the grid at high-G Mid-Ohio suggested he’d found a way to cope. Yet that would prove to be one of only three occasions in 10 races where he started ahead of Rosenqvist. When all is right, Felix is an extremely fast qualifier, as O’Ward will tell you, but still, these relative performances suggested to some that Malukas wasn’t quite on the level of other Class of ’22 Rookies such as his old Indy Lights rival Kyle Kirkwood or Christian Lundgaard.

Still, Larry and A.J. Foyt thought they saw a spark of promise there, and by mid-August had signed Malukas for 2025. Ever since A.J. Foyt Racing had formed a technical alliance with Penske the previous summer, Penske’s team president Tim Cindric had suggested that the Foyt team could provide a training ground for Indy NXT graduates and other young drivers before being considered for the main team. So from the moment Malukas was announced as a Foyt driver in August ’24, we assumed Penske’s medium-term plan was to graduate him at the expense of ‘old man’ Power. Quite how soon that deal was done is open to debate…

Problem was, with Power back to his best in ’24, Penske had backed itself into a situation where it planned to release a driver who at that point had earned the marque 41 wins and 64 poles, the fastest IndyCar driver of this century, and replace him with a driver who had just two podiums to his name. (Even now, that seems very un-Penske, as if there was another reason for Malukas coming onboard.) Perhaps if the team showed no interest in discussing a new deal with Power, despite long-term contracts for McLaughlin and Newgarden, Will might decide there was no available ride to match a Penske-Chevy, and thus ‘voluntarily’ bring the curtain down on the IndyCar chapter of his career.

In recent years Power has continued to refine his approach to qualifying, and passed Mario Andretti for IndyCar’s all-time pole record at Laguna Seca in 2022. (Then capped the weekend off by winning his second championship). Chris Owens/IMS

Again, despite a decade-and-a-half of working with the man, Penske had failed to anticipate another side of Power’s resilience: try to coerce him at your peril. And I’m with Will on this. To my mind, great drivers earn the right to call time on their spell in the cockpit. Most take the hint when they stop receiving calls from prospective employers, but there are other unlucky souls who are dealt a bad hand by Fate. It saddened me greatly that injury ended Franchitti’s superb IndyCar career one year before he intended to quit, because he’d still got it, whatever anyone says. Heck, he took four poles that year! The loss of a competitive Robert Kubica in Formula 1 possibly changed the course of history in that branch of the sport and, to me, is still heartbreaking. And while this sounds more of a First World problem in comparison, I was extremely annoyed that Penske railroaded Castroneves into his IMSA team when Helio was still a winner in open-wheel… although at least Meyer Shank gave him a glorious chance of retribution.

Sensing last year that forces within the team had already decided he was to be replaced at the end of ’25, that nothing he did in the previous season or the forthcoming season would prolong his future at the squad, Power reclaimed control of his destiny by signing with the new A14 agency co-founded by (among others) Fernando Alonso and Will’s longtime friend and former teammate Oriol Servia. That announcement in January incensed many at Penske, who suddenly became aware that no, their homegrown legend was not going to be ushered into his La-Z-Boy at the end of the season and would instead become part of their opposition. Ask not only what your current driver can do for you, but also what he might do for one of your rivals in the near future.

In June, Roger Penske confirmed Power’s suspicion that he stood on shifting sands, and gave him verbal permission to look elsewhere. However, Roger may not recall that, since for several days, his racing focus had been on dealing with the fallout from his team’s second ‘cheating’ scandal in 14 months. Just before Top 12 qualifying for the Indy 500, the attenuators (one of a long list of unmodifiable spec parts on an IndyCar) on the cars of Power and Newgarden were observed to have been modified, and this was brought to the attention of IndyCar Tech. Cars No. 2 and No. 12 had their qualifying times pulled and were consigned to the back row of the grid.

In response, Penske, as head of both IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had to be seen to be strong, especially given that in 2024, some outside observers had considered his temporary suspension of team president Cindric and others following the St. Pete ‘Boostgate’ scandal had been weak. So now The Captain felt compelled to make Cindric, general manager Kyle Moyer and managing director Ron Ruzewski walk the plank.

Whether any/some/all of these firings caused Team Penske’s limp 2025 results in IndyCar is unclear. Truth be told, the team looked a tad leaden even before May, as if other teams had caught up in key technical areas such as finding setups that are kind to tires. There were days when Penske still looked like Penske, but usually they were left breathless by the unrelenting nature of the Palou/Ganassi combo.

To be fair, so was everyone else, even Palou’s legendary teammate Dixon, whose scruffier driving style just doesn’t meld with the smooth techniques required by the ass-heavy current iteration of the Dallara DW12, replete with hybrid system. By his own admission, Dixon’s way saturates the rear tires and he and Ganassi have been

working on a quite different range of setups to compensate for his demands of those rear Firestones.

His longstanding rival, Power, takes a quite different approach. Ever since he started, Will has never expected a team to modify a car’s setup to suit his style. He has his preferences, of course, but isn’t rigid. He is far more from the school of, ‘Make the car as fast as it can be, and I’ll adapt and figure out the best way to wring the most from it.’ He studies data like an FAA official with the blackbox of a crashed plane, sifting through all the facts and figures and, with the help of his race engineer, comes to conclusions on where car and driver must improve. On reaching his verdicts, he then acts upon them.

And, it seems to me almost uniquely, Power remains this way, despite being nearer the end than the beginning of his career. Those who have followed IndyCar and Formula 1 for many years can think of several examples of drivers who, once they reach their late 30s or early 40s, become quite inflexible in terms of their setup demands. They want an engineer who can make a car suit them, and if this can’t be done, they suddenly lose their edge.

Power’s sheer competitive spirit as well as his fascination with the technical side of racing will ensure this never happens to him. He enjoys the process of evolution, however far the current IndyCar is from his ideal, however much he yearns for 1,000hp cars with a more forward weight distribution.

Oh, and he remains damn fast. Two decades of IndyCar experience have taught him when to hold, when to fold and when to be bold. His win in Portland last month was only the most recent demonstration of that. And this completeness has been recognized by others: Servia freely admits that, as Power’s agent, he had discussions with the top brass in all other IndyCar teams in recent weeks, even though he found most of them still disbelieving that Penske would freeze out its most consistent driver. Only one principal shut down the notion of adding Power to his lineup before talks truly got going – and this despite the fact that this principal’s star driver was eager for Will to join and help make the team more consistent. Oh well. Maybe retaining Nolan Siegel will work out.

Servia, who is now part of Power’s management team, admits that his client’s free agency caught the attention of teams all the way along pitlane. Aaron Skillman/IMS

What will Power’s absence mean for Team Penske? Well, he was not an agitator by nature and while enjoying/enduring rivalries with all of his teammates down the years, he was never one to use his track record as a bargaining chip within the team. Indeed, that was arguably one of his failings; years with Derrick Walker as his employer, then later his adviser, taught him to keep his mouth shut and be grateful for what he’d got, so he was often too passive at Penske HQ. This was fine while the team president was strategist on his car, but Cindric’s switch to newcomer Newgarden in 2017 left Power looking over his shoulder, gauging whether the best crew guys were now being monopolized by the No. 2 team.

Penske will also miss Power’s loyalty, I suspect, his willingness to sacrifice himself for the team’s cause. Offhand, I can think of four examples. In 2009, his part-time season with Team Penske, Power collided with Graham Rahal on the opening lap at Toronto, got a puncture, stormed back through the field to run third. Before the final restart, he radioed his team to ask if he could pass teammate Ryan Briscoe because he was confident he could tackle Briscoe’s championship rival and race leader Franchitti. Power was instructed to stay third and back up the opposition, allow Briscoe to go fight his own battle with the Ganassi car.

Four years later at the same venue, Power had two bad results in the double-header in the middle of a hitherto winless season, so felt no longer in the running for the championship. He voluntarily informed Penske that until the end of the year, he would try and help his teammate Castroneves earn that elusive title.

At Sonoma Raceway in 2015, Power was still in the running for the championship when he was punted off by teammate Montoya who had been leading the points coming into the event. In the late stages of the race, JPM was running sixth and needed one place more to beat race leader Dixon to the title. Despite now having nothing to lose and still seething at Montoya’s blunder, Power nonetheless held station behind him to try and maximize his teammate’s chances of turning the points battle in his and Penske’s favor.

Two years later, also at Sonoma, Power desperately wanted to end his season on a high with a fourth win, even though he was realistically out of the running for the title. But he swiftly understood which way the wind was blowing within the team when a couple of his best crew guys were transferred to Newgarden’s car, as the latter held just a three-point lead over Dixon. Power was made aware what needed to be done for the team as a whole, and dutifully played backstop on raceday. As teammates Pagenaud and Newgarden fought for the race win, Power sat in third as tail-gunner to keep Dixon in fourth and thus make Newgarden the champ.

So Power knows how to play the team game to the detriment of his own ambitions, all because he understands the big picture, whereas he never experienced any on-track payback for his sacrifices, where team orders were applied in his favor. I have no doubt that come the tail-end of 2026, should he be out of the running for t he championship and one of his teammates still has a chance, Power will do all he can to help maximize Andretti Global’s chances of title glory.

I’m sure Penske will also miss Power’s tech savvy. It will be interesting to watch Newgarden and McLaughlin try and push the team back to the frontline in Power’s absence, especially while their race engineers try and fit into the revised management model at Penske. New team president Jonathan Diuguid can do good – he’s a fine person (as well as a great engineer) and I felt desperately sorry for him at Portland after Power won. There he was in the press conference being quizzed about Will’s future with the team when he pretty much knew there was no such thing beyond Aug. 31st and that situation was not of his making.

But the idea that Diuguid can continue to help run Penske’s Porsche sportscar program in a hands-on manner – as he was doing before Penske’s Month of May firings – while also governing the IndyCar team is surely stretching him too far. Meanwhile, do the race engineers of 2025 – Ben Bretzman (McLaughlin), Luke Mason (Newgarden) or Dave Faustino (Power) – wish to step up to the plate?

Faustino is another guy deserving of some pity. He was Power’s race engineer since the start of 2007 at Walker Racing, with only a single-year gap, and they bonded through fastidious work ethic, intense competitiveness and friendship. There have been times over the years when I wondered if they should go their separate ways: however many times we saw Will being too ambitious in his driving maneuvers, there were occasions where I felt Dave and the strategic team on the No. 12 weren’t brave enough tactics-wise, didn’t play to their driver’s considerable strengths, or simply didn’t roll the dice even when there was little to lose. That said, my critiquing of Will or Dave was done in hindsight, which is perhaps hardly fair! In retrospect, I find the ending of their near-telepathic relationship rather sad.

Let’s face it, the whole demise of the Team Penske-Will Power partnership is upsetting. And frustrating. Had the team chosen to drop him in favor of a Palou, Herta, Kyle Kirkwood, Lundgaard or O’Ward – drivers of proven quality with 15 years ahead of them – Power might have understood. But Malukas has to his name just three podium finishes (admittedly, all excellent) and three more potential podiums that disappeared through no fault of his own. True, he hasn’t been in a great team yet, but his best result on a non-oval is a sixth place. If Penske rediscovers its mojo, if this year’s so-so showing has been a mere aberration, I can see Malukas becoming an occasional race-winner. But nothing I’ve seen from self-styled “Little Dave” suggests he has the necessary stones to bring down Ganassi’s Goliath, Palou. Nor am I certain he has the temperament to deal with the pace, determination and psychological warfare he’ll experience close-up from Newgarden and McLaughlin. They make a formidable pairing and Malukas is about to enter their house; he shouldn’t be surprised if he’s made to use the cat-flap.

Power and long-time race engineer Dave Faustino share a hug after their final race together in Nashville last weekend. James Black/IMS

No driver is bigger than his team, but Power’s departure will doubtless cause an unsettling feeling among other Penske long-termers. Some who guessed Will was being ousted even left before the season was over, including crew members on the No. 12. He also lost his best gearbox guy two weeks before the finale, and it may have been this individual’s absence that precipitated the gearbox issue that ruined Will’s final race with the team. He couldn’t change down to first gear as he headed into his pitbox while leading, so locked the brakes and overshot, and then the engine stalled as he tried to depart in second gear.

That sounds like just a one-off abnormality, but it’s unusual for Penske, a team renowned for its attention to detail, for having the right people in place to anticipate and then prevent issues, not just cure them. Remember back in 2017 when almost everyone, it seemed, was bitching about inconsistent brake pads from Performance Friction Corporation, following IndyCar’s switch of allegiance from Brembo? There were no such complaints from the Penske drivers because their crew chiefs had identified potential problems with overheating and had made necessary adjustments, whereas their counterparts in other teams had made assumptions based on previous experience and just plugged in and played. I wonder if Team Penske’s upheavals over the past two seasons, and word-of-mouth from the disenchanted and departed, will deter an influx of the diligent kind of staff who support the ‘brainiac’ race engineers Faustino, Bretzman and Mason.

I’m not predicting Team Penske is about to enter a slump akin to its winless 1998-’99 seasons, but it has just released its most technically astute driver since the late, lamented Gil de Ferran, the man who spearheaded the squad’s revitalization in 2000. True, back then, the simultaneous discarding of the ball-and-chain combo of home-grown chassis, Mercedes engines and Goodyear tires, and the adoption of Reynard, Honda and Firestone was just as vital, maybe even more so. But it was de Ferran who propelled the team up the learning curve, catching and beating the squads that already had experience of this OEM combo, and winning the championship.

It’s my firm belief that Power can have a similar effect at Andretti Global, and remember, Dan Towriss’s team is starting a hell of a lot closer to Ganassi than Penske were back in the dark days of ’98/’99. AG has long had probably the best street course package, while Kirkwood and Herta have each scored an oval win over the past 12 months. Power’s modus operandi will ensure he helps fill the gaps in Andretti’s data bank across all types of track, and he’ll doubtless prove invaluable to Honda, having driven Chevys since the Bowtie returned to IndyCar in 2012. I suspect, too, that he will revel in the HRC unit’s superior driveability, a characteristic noted by every other Chevy-to-Honda convert.

I think Power will also enjoy working with Kirkwood, who is not only prodigiously talented and a multiple race-winner, but is also someone who I’ve always felt was just the right degree of cocky. He may be able to help Marcus Ericsson, who is a sweet guy and a good pedaler, albeit one whose driving this year and last suggests he is currently subsumed by a lack of confidence. And providing feedback to – and bouncing ideas off – engineers such as Nathan O’Rourke, Jeremy Milless, Dave Seyffert, chief engineer Craig Hampson and technical director Eric Bretzman will swiftly endear Power to a team whose COO Rob Edwards is smart and a longtime fan of Power’s, having worked with him back in 2005 to ’07 at Walker Racing. Yup, Andretti does have formidable depth – although their pitcrews’ performance needs urgent attention.