Indianapolis 500 has 21 drivers who have won multiple times
Here are the drivers who earned more than a spot on the Borg-Warner Trophy with their victory at the Indianapolis 500.
After watching the cool, calm 25-year-old Alex Palou methodically plot his way to an IndyCar championship in his second season, Will Power knew he had to change. Seven, nearly eight years after his only Astor Cup victory in 2014, a breakthrough that came from the agony of three consecutive collapses at the end of the 2010-12 season, Power admitted after the end of the 2022 season that he realized it was time to stop banging his head against the wall and hoping something would change.
When his two Team Penske teammates combined for eight wins compared to his single victory, he never let it bother him. We never saw the typical “Will Power explosion of emotion” when you couldn’t turn a 4th, 3rd or 2nd place into a win. Power’s plan for this season, after seeing Palou emulate his “Ice Man” teammate Ganassi in many ways with three wins, eight podiums and very few unforced errors in 2021, was to position himself as close to the front as possible. At the end of the season, he even admitted that he was sometimes too conservative when wins were possible, but the less fiery Power held back and waited for the right moment.
“Every time you’re on a podium, you don’t look back. You look back to the day you finished 19th. That’s the kind of day you lose championships. Top-three drivers don’t,” Power said after the 2022 season finale. “We’ve done a lot of them. Every time I finished in the top four, I was happy. Before, after a race, I would have been fuming.”
“I’ve said it from the beginning of the year: ‘I’m playing the long game.’ I’ve never done that before, and this year I’m doing it. I don’t really care about winning. I just want another championship, and that’s the game I played.”
IndyCar News: After victory in Portland, Will Power remains defiant despite rumors of his retirement
Looking ahead to 2024, Power said on Sunday after his third win of the year – his first three-win season since 2018 and his first multi-win season since 2020 – that the calm, patient and conservative Will Power was gone – again shortly after watching Palou, arguably the most talented driver in the sport right now, up his own game and leave the rest of the field behind in 2023. The Spaniard’s championship title a year ago was the series’ first since 2005 to be decided before the season finale. For Power, Palou’s five wins in 2023 – including three in a row and four of five in the summer – along with 10 podiums and not a single finish outside the top eight represented a new level of determination and supreme precision that simply cannot be achieved by passively waiting for wins to fall into your lap and racking up top-five finishes.
To get back in the race after getting the ship back on course after it went so off course on and off the track last year, he would have to undergo another transformation.
“I learned from (Palou’s) championship last year that my style would not have worked in 2022. You had to win and that’s the case this year,” Power said Sunday after running away from second-place Palou by nearly 10 seconds to take the win at Portland International Raceway. “There were a lot of mistakes from a lot of drivers this year.
“One year you’re a little conservative, and the next you see Palou winning with a little more aggressiveness, so you get a little more aggressive. You never stop digging and searching. I actually went into this season with the mindset that I had to win multiple races. It’s been a long time since I did that.”
And as fans of the sport and the paddock have seen over the last few race weekends, there have been moments on and off the track that one would never have seen from Power two years ago. The added intensity of this year’s grind, including a late-race charge for 4th in Toronto that saw his Penske teammate Scott McLaughlin crash out and Power drop seven spots by the checkered flag, as well as the fireworks that followed his crash in the midst of a potential victory at World Wide Technology Raceway – middle fingers, shouted profanities and all – are indicative of the two versions of himself that Power must fuse together.
IndyCar News: Will Power shows Penske teammate Josef Newgarden the middle finger at the end of the IndyCar race
“You’re walking a fine line between being aggressive and being consistent. If you look at (Scott) Dixon, 99 percent of the time he’s not going to use a 50/50 strategy. He’s more cautious and he’s won championships with it,” Power said. “Palou is more aggressive.”
“He balances the fine line between aggression and reward very well, and I always play on one side or the other. In 2022, I was too conservative. In 2023, I had a bad year, and so I might be a little too aggressive at times this year, but that’s the game you play. You have to find the sweet spot, and that’s difficult.”
Power’s wife Liz, whose husband was pushed to the brink of retirement a year ago due to a near-fatal illness, says that as a fundamental support to the two-time champion, she can see how her husband brought out and absorbed the best in himself both 12 years ago and today.
The “old Will Power” wouldn’t have called NBC’s Dillon Welch and his rival David Malukas a day later – both of whom were in the firing line of tirades on WWTR after the veteran’s accident – and immediately cracked funny jokes to clear things up. Nor would Power have been so unmoved by the fact that his longtime strategist Ron Ruzewski invited his driver to go wakesurfing last Monday afternoon – an invitation Power accepted – only to find a boat at Power’s dock with controversial teammate Josef Newgarden on board.
And that ability for Power to instantly shake off disastrous moments on the track has translated into his results. A day after his disappointing 18th-place finish in Race 1 at Iowa Speedway, caused by three penalties, Power won Race 2 despite starting 22nd.
Eight days after his massive disappointment on the short oval outside St. Louis, Power triumphed again in Portland, where he almost had to win to keep Palou within reach.
“Experience helps,” Liz Power told IndyStar after the race Sunday. “He’s definitely grown up. He used to hold on to it, but I think it helps him when there’s another race right after. (Last week) he took a day to sulk and then he moved on.”
Power is so intent — and so eager — to reinvent his routines and himself that the family has invested in a second RV to use on the weekends the Powers stay at the track. This year at Road America, when the Powers’ original bus malfunctioned, Will decided out of necessity to sleep alone that weekend. The curtains in his RV were held in place with staples and special curtains blacked out the interior so the title contender could get the 10 hours of sleep — or at least eight hours straight — required to perform at his physical peak.
This weekend ended his two-plus-year winless streak. His entire family is at the track for every race and hotel rooms don’t make sense. Power now has his own Zen room to relax in and a separate one to enjoy every possible moment with his son Beau – an amenity the family will have at their disposal for race weekends in Milwaukee and Nashville to complete Power’s title chase.
“When you’re 20, you don’t have to do that. I had sleepless nights and got up and got the pole. But when you get a little older, you have to sleep so much, man,” Power said. “Just ask Tom Brady.”
Liz added: “He gets worried when I have to keep driving between hotels after being ill. With this device, we don’t have to keep an eye on him all the time. He can relax and we can be right next to each other, but he can rest and come back later and spend more time together.”
The Team Penske driver’s 2022 championship was career-defining, proving he was still among the sport’s best on and off the track at a very different point in his career. But a third-place finish, at 43, at a time in IndyCar that oddly feels even more competitive than it did two years ago?
Only five drivers have accomplished more in the more than 100 years of American open-wheel racing.
His 44 total wins put him comfortably in fourth place all-time, and his all-time pole record of 70 is a mark in the sport that is unlikely to be seriously challenged anytime soon, if ever. A third IndyCar title would give him the status of perhaps one of the five or six best drivers the sport has ever seen based on his performance, longevity and career statistics.
“To win a third title from a 54-point deficit, yes, that would be fantastic, absolutely fantastic,” Power said on Sunday. “It’s a tough climb from here, but not impossible.”
“When I go into the paddock, I think to myself, ‘It would be really hard for me to give up this sport. The feeling of being part of something, of trying to achieve something with a group of people, I think I would be pretty lost if I stopped doing that. I love racing, love the paddock, love the people. I’m glad I can do this.'”
