Will Power won’t allow a faulty seatbelt to overshadow a strong 2024 NTT INDYCAR SERIES season.
Team Penske driver Power saw his championship aspirations dashed 12 laps into the Big Machine Grand Prix Presented by Gainbridge on Sept. 15 at Nashville Superspeedway when he had to bring the No. 12 Verizon Business Team Penske Chevrolet to pit lane to reattach his seatbelt.
Power entered the season finale trailing eventual champion Alex Palou by 33 points but left fourth in the standings, 46 points behind.
The veteran of 24 NTT INDYCAR SERIES seasons is aware one race didn’t keep him from hoisting the Astor Challenge Cup championship trophy for the third time in his career.
“Very satisfying,” Power said of his season. “Obviously, we’d love to have won a championship, and I think we had the potential. It’s just Palou is very, very good. He’s very measured. He’s a tough guy to beat. If you’ve beat him in the championship, you’ve done a good job.”
Power led Palou, 3-2, in the victory column and 7-6 in the podium finishes category, but Palou had 13 top-five finishes in 17 starts compared to seven by Power.
Consistency was the difference. That’s why Power is taking a page out of Palou’s playbook, which mirrored the 2022 championship-winning season where Power had just one victory but 12 top-five finishes, in hopes to return to that approach in 2025.
“Can’t wait to start next year,” he said. “I feel like we found some great directions with the car, and I never stopped learning. I hope we come back and work on the weaknesses that I had this year, and maybe that’s a bit of consistency of stepping over the mark a couple times. Maybe pull that back a bit like 2022, which in this field is almost too much, but you’ve got to find that sweet spot. You’ve got to keep digging and can’t relax.”
Power struggled with that balance this season.
He crashed and finished 24th in the Indianapolis 500 presented by Gainbridge after starting second. He was penalized four different times in the Detroit race and still managed a sixth-place finish. He had contact with teammate Scott McLaughlin late in both WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca and at the streets of Toronto, dropping him to finishes of seventh and 12th, respectively.
A mid-race speeding penalty July 13 at Iowa Speedway dropped him to 18th. Aggressive racing with David Malukas, sparking the Meyer Shank Racing driver to a crash late at World Wide Technology Raceway on Aug. 17, created a caution. Power was collected in a crash on the ensuing restart, finishing 18th. Then a spin on a midrace restart at Milwaukee Mile on Sept. 1 dropped him to 10th after Palou already was laps down due to an electrical problem.
Power could have scored a top-five finish in all six races. He knows those errors of overstepping the aggression level kept him from the title, not a seatbelt.
That’s a stark contrast to how Power began the 2024 season, with three runner-up finishes in the opening four races. Then came a nine-race stretch where the only top-five finishes Power accumulated were victories June 9 at Road America and July 14 at Iowa Speedway. His average finish was 10.8 in that span compared to 3.0 in the first four.
Finding the perfect balance of aggression and patience is the magic recipe for Power in 2025.