Hawkers Sunglasses
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The Polarized Carbono Sky One is not the only model that will allow you to take your style a leap in quality. The variety of glasses is practically infinite and we have nothing left to do but to warmly invite you to visit the portal to find out which model is best suited to your tastes and style. Furthermore, if you are interested in further updates on discounts, we strongly suggest you subscribe to our four Telegram channels dedicated to offers, where we will offer you in real time all the best promotions related to Offers, Hardware & Tech, Clothing and Sports and Chinese products. Happy shopping!
Will Power: Australian IndyCar racing champion
Meet Will Power, the first Australian to blitz the hard, fast and perilous world of IndyCar racing. What drives his need for speed? By Konrad Marshall
Fat blimps swim in languid circles, choppers chitter, propeller planes drag advertisements for personal injury lawyers and Crown Royal whisky, and that wide Midwestern sky glares on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Chevys and F-150s congest the carriageways in every direction of this city in the American heartland. It takes up to four hours to reach the venue, to commune in the humid haze with more than 400,000 people at what will be the largest single-day sporting event in the world.
For every thousand Americans, one of them is here today, from screaming toddlers to tobacco-chewers in John Deere hats. And they come bedecked in racing-team colours and camouflage, in jorts and bras, smoking cigars and dragging coolers of Bud Lite past the hawkers.
A black man outside the venue does a roaring trade in T-shirts. His best seller: “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica – TRUMP that BITCH”. (Another has two arrows pointing outwards, one at each bicep. And a message: “Let’s see Obama try to take away THESE guns.”)
The more bulbous among the throng inhale concession-stand delights, from smoked turkey legs to litre cups of vodka lemonade, from big Bavarian pretzels to dirty Tanqueray martinis. They say things like: “I rully do love this ee-vent, dontchaknow,” and “Sup, bruther?” and “Good golly!”
There are dignified farmers in loose-fit jeans held up by suspenders. There are tanned types with gleaming grins and seersucker suits. And there are little old ladies with white hair and green plastic visors, who sit in legacy seats held in their families for generations.
The slogan for the hundredth running of the Indianapolis 500 – the so-called Greatest Spectacle in Racing (™) – is “Epic Race, Epic Place” and it’s hard to argue. NFL stars, country singers, Ice-T and Lady Gaga are here. And they all gravitate to the starting grid, where asphalt swallows the sunshine, an ethanol perfume blows on the wind, and the whole place crackles as though the eyes of the planet are here alone.
The drivers, standing behind stanchions, have space in the crush. Some bounce on their toes. Others pal around, slapping chests. And in the middle of it all, there he is. Our man. Silent, with pale-blue eyes behind dark sunglasses, knowing in 10 minutes he will join 32 other drivers piloting 600-horsepower missiles around the track, going fast enough to cover the length of a football field in under a second.
Yep, there he is, Will Power, the boy from Toowoomba. Will Power, the 2014 IndyCar champion. Will Power, the driver they say is the fastest here – and the most unlucky. Will Power, shy and sometimes awkward – and not quite beloved. Will Power, who has seen death and is haunted by its face. Will Power, the man with the name! Will Power, the most famous Australian race-car driver you’ve never heard of.
BELOWWill Power: 'I knew this was what I wanted to do the rest of my life.'The scene is a little different one day earlier, inside his on-course motor home. Power is reclining on a couch in a polo shirt, singing to me.
“White lips, pale face. Breathing in snowflakes,” he croons, hoping I recognise the tune. “Burnt lungs, sour taste … You know the one?”
I don’t.
“The A Team,” he says, clapping. “Ed Sheeran.”
We’re talking about time away from the track, and how he loves his karaoke machine and drum kit. He sings when he makes dinner. Wails Bob Marley and Bon Jovi. Doesn’t shy away from Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj. Can hit the high note on Bennie and the Jets.
“I’m not good, but I’ll sing anything,” he says. “I’ll hear a song on the radio and go, ‘I’ll sing that tonight.’ ”
Power is a funny guy. Makes sense. His brother is comedian Damien Power, who has a regular spot on The Project, but it’s much harder to tell when brother Will is joking. His affect is a total deadpan. Sitting in this oak-panelled, leather-furnished Winnebago, for instance, I can’t tell if he is serious or not when he says he stayed in one last year that had a stripper pole in the living area. (He borrowed the motor home from NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt jnr.)
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I ask when he fell in love with racing. His answer begins in south-eastern Queensland, as one of four brothers in a brick house overlooking the Lockyer Valley. His father was a semi-competitive racing car driver, and young Power raced go-karts and watched televised Formula 1 races starring Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, fixating on the cockpit camera – the steering wheel rattling the hands on hard turns. His dad used to say that real drivers race real cars, so the son adored only purpose-built machines with fat tyres, exposed seats and winged bodywork, where all parts serve a purpose and nothing is for style.
In his teens he worked at a wholesale confectionery outlet, stacking shelves and driving forklifts, and then at his father’s canvas business, making tents and car covers and canopies. At 16, driving was mostly a hobby, done on dirt tracks in beefed-up Datsuns and Commodores – a mix of bush, blowflies and speed until a pivotal moment when he was given a test-drive in a Formula Ford at the Lakeside Raceway near Brisbane.
“It was such an amazing feeling. The first time I went out, shifting gears – bang! bang! bang!”
“And the steering is shaking with every little bump on the road, and you’re so low in the car. I knew this was what I wanted to do the rest of my life.”
By 18, he was competing in domestic racing circuits, and learning all he could about corner weights and ride heights. Learning how to change gear ratios and do wheel alignments. Learning how to find that sweet spot between productive aggression and wasteful impatience.
“Whatever the profession – surgeons or drummers or drivers – I believe the best type of people are OCD,” he says. “You want everything to be perfect, so you work on it and enjoy it, and do it over and over and over, looking and studying every element – searching for every little fraction of improvement.”
BELOWBaby Will with his mother, Marg, and brothers Ken, Nick and Damien in Toowoomba. As a teenager, dirt-track racing a hotted-up Datsun 1200 in Queensland in 1994.The indirect saviour of his career stands next to him now, in a big tent at a media lunch. His name is Hélio Castroneves. The Brazilian is a teammate and competitor, and known on the racing circuit as an affable genius.
Right now virtually all eyes are upon him, if they’re not on the barbecue beef and mashed potato with rosemary, or the salad bar and hot dog stand, or the cheesecake and Miller Lite in the fridge. As the press gorges and a thunderstorm pelts the marquee, Castroneves stops to chat. “Will is unique,” he says. “Let’s start with the fun part – he is weird. Sort of germaphobic. Strange. Like, sometimes you go to shake hands, and he doesn’t shake, and then he will hug you. So you didn’t want a handshake and now you want a hug? It’s weird!”
Sometimes the public thinks he is “mean”, because he has no filter. “But that’s his way,” Castroneves says. “In the bottom of his heart, he is a very naive person, and I like that. He wants good for everyone. I think he’s just pure – and that’s sometimes awkward. And he is a heck of a driver, man. He is truly going in a direction I haven’t seen.”
Their paths collided in 2008.
When Power was on the verge of quitting, Castroneves was in trouble, facing serious tax evasion charges and a stint in prison. His seat at Team Penske – the benchmark in the sport – needed to be filled. Power was known more for his name than anything else, says team strategist Tim Cindric, but the seat-filler only had to be good, a team player, and agree to hand the keys back to the South American if he was cleared in court.
Power won an interview in Detroit, and remembers taping his practice runs, reviewing his answers, making a list of dos and don’ts. One tip was to avoid giving his trademark stare – when his gaze drifts until he is looking right at you, blankly, his blue eyes on stalks for an eternity. Cindric recalls thinking, was this guy an emotionless automaton – or a nervous interviewee? A few calls confirmed the latter and alleviated any concerns. “If you look at his career from start to now, Will has had to claw all the way. He’s a bit of a street-fighter,” Cindric says.
“He has the talent and ability, but he’s also hungry.”
They gave Power a chance, and with immediate strong performances he turned it into a full-time gig – even after Castroneves was cleared. “What differentiates Will is his understanding of the sport, his commitment to being prepared, his knowledge of the history of each race,” Cindric says. “If there’s a weakness, it’s that he’ll over-think. Sometimes you have to remind him to just drive the car.”
BELOW'He's a bit of a street fighter.'There’s a saying in motor sport: every race features one winner followed by 19 excuses.
Yet bad luck plays a real role in who wins and loses. On race day, everything from engineering and strategy to pit stops and driving has to go smoothly, while dodging crashes and penalties.
David Malsher, US editor and IndyCar correspondent for motorsport.com, says the misfortune endured by Will Power is unmatched. Power has won the championship once, in 2014, but could easily be a four-time winner were it not for a perverse combination of technical problems, strategic calls, smashes and, sometimes, driver error. Malsher, the author of The Sheer Force of Will Power, says his bio subject was clearly the fastest man in the series throughout 2010, 2011 and 2012, but finished runner-up three times.
“It happens to guys in races, or seasons, but for Will it’s happened his whole career,” Malsher says. “His stats have just not done him justice. He’s had 44 pole positions but only 25 wins – that disparity is amazing.”
Power says finishing second the first time didn’t bother him too much. Missing out the final time was painfully disheartening. But in the middle year, he didn’t care at all. He had other concerns flowing from a disastrous 15-car crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on October 16, 2011. I ask what happened. “No, I don’t want to talk about that,” he says quickly, waving away the question. “It’s in the book. I couldn’t even read that chapter.”
“I don’t want to bring it up now, before a race.”
The circuit had arrived in Nevada for a contest worth $US5 million. As part of a promotion, the cars had crawled down the main strip in Las Vegas at night, away from the fountains of the Bellagio. It was an intense race. A small track with a field of 34 meant the cars would be glued together in bunches three wide, which Power privately called a “lottery for lunatics”.
“At such speeds, things happen very quickly, and there’s never a good result,” he says of all racing. “You have to be lucky for it not to be a hard hit. It’s definitely on the mind.”
All it took was an innocuous touch of wheels, a spin, and then the car of Dan Wheldon, the reigning Indy 500 champion, was flying. It surged into what is called a “catch fence” – a mess of wire and poles above the track.
Power, too, went airborne. Online footage from his cockpit shows how he lifts off, banks sideways in the air and crashes down. Before the footage goes black, a tyre flies at the screen, swallowed by a fireball.
“Will’s car looked like a Harrier jump jet,” says Malsher. “Debris stops just short of his face, and then he comes to a halt and another wrecked car slides alongside him, that of Dan Wheldon, who is very obviously not alive anymore.”
Power stays motionless in his seat, worried he has broken his back, but it means he is facing Wheldon the whole time. Later in the medical centre, he has to turn away from the sight of blood pooling on the floor.
“After that, he basically went through a period of post-traumatic stress disorder,” says Malsher, “because he was staring at a dead colleague.”
His physical recovery was short, but the mental wounds would take longer. In the months following, he found himself reviewing the crash footage again and again. Yet he returned to racing. “Some of the things that I’ve seen and had to deal with can be tough to keep out of your head,” he says. “But you have to forget about it. You have to get in the car.”
BELOW'Some of the things that I've seen can be tough to keep out of your head.'A view exists in racing that Power is not simply quirky or odd, but in fact cold and arrogant. “I don’t know what the public perception is, and honestly I don’t care. You’re never going to make everyone happy,” he says. “People have these opinions based on the way you look or sound or carry yourself. You can work hard at that, or you can work hard at being competitive.”
Malsher notes that when Power makes even bland post-race statements – “We need to stop making mistakes like that” – he is attacked for innocuous candour. But he also makes bona fide mistakes – calling one driver a wanker, another a princess. For various infractions he is fined, and forced to make apologetic calls to sponsors. I ask him to tell me about one of these incidents.
“I’ll show you one,” he says, grabbing his iPhone and finding a video clip on YouTube: “Will Power Flips Off Officials”. Angry over a race control decision, the clip shows him storming up pit row on foot. Then he turns toward the officials, screams and flashes two middle fingers. The double bird.
“That went everywhere,” he says, shaking his head. “I became a meme.”
Power with two fingers was Photoshopped onto everything from historic race pics to the front of the Titanic (being hugged by Leonardo DiCaprio).
Liz, his cheerleader and brand manager, says she stays positive in those moments. The fiery driver is not who Power is at home in North Carolina, or on vacation in their favourite holiday spot, Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. At work though, his attitude is a PR blessing and a curse – and a reality.
“You never know what he’s going to say. The average fan might see ‘arrogant’, but that’s not Will,” she says. “On race day he’s there to focus, and he really does have tunnel vision. That’s part of what makes him great at what he does.”
Focus is what won the championship in 2014. He still had bad luck that year, and made mistakes. But he also finished every race, and completed all but one lap for the entire year – the first time anyone had done so in more than a decade. It was not a product of caution, he adds, but faith in natural aggression.
“I was driving my own way, not chasing too hard or sitting back being tentative. It taught me a lesson: you’ve gotta race as you race, and everything will happen as it should.”
BELOWPower's $1-million mean machine.Stripped down to its barest elements in the garage at the track, Power’s car looks like a science-fiction nightmare. The deconstructed monster is an economical assembly of muscle and bone, black rubber and chrome.
Heat fills the shop only two days before the race, and so Matt Jonsson is sweating as he co-ordinates a blur of wrenches and pneumatic drills, affixing $US400 nuts and $US3000 sockets. Fully assembled, the machine is worth perhaps $US1million. Jonsson is the chief mechanic for car number 12, and he runs me through the basics. “The engine is a Chevrolet 2.2-litre twin turbocharged V6, which generates around 600 or so horsepower, limited to 12,300 RPM,” Jonsson says. “It sits right behind him, with the fuel cell at his back. The car is one central spine, very hard, very stiff.”
So far, so good. Then things get technical. I don’t really understand the physics, but apparently the aerodynamics of the car conspire to create what they call “downforce” – the all-important pressure that pulls it to the ground. Under certain conditions, they can generate more than one tonne of downforce. What does that mean?
It means if the car were driving along the bottom of a gigantic tunnel at top speed (about 370 kilometres per hour), it could climb up the side of the tunnel until it was literally driving upside-down.Then it could keep driving. Upside down. Gripping the roof of the tunnel. Yeah. That’s downforce.
Jonsson runs me through the cockpit next. It’s made out of foam, custom-moulded to Power’s body, digitally scanned and machined out of impact-resistant thermoplastic polymer. There is a tiny tunnel for his legs – so tight, Power can only shimmy in and out with the steering wheel removed. The wheel is also shaped to his preferred grip, and has paddles on either side: clutch on the left and gear shift on the right.
Jonsson tells me all this over a deafening hiss as the car is lifted and lowered by hydraulics. The engine whinnies and roars next as they test and tweak. It sounds fast, I tell him weakly. He says “fast” is as much a measure of the driver, and how he closes the gap between one manoeuvre and the next.
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Power must brake as late as possible, accelerate as quickly as he can, making sure the tyres maintain traction and all the digital gauges are optimal. “Will has to know those numbers, have that feel, close that gap, and keep track of it all, for hundreds of laps, and for hours on end,” Jonsson says. “And he does.”
BELOWThe 100th running of the Indy 500 in May.The track at Indianapolis is vast. The stadium is, in fact, the centre of its own municipality (Speedway) with its own zip code (46224), along with police station, hospital, golf course, budget liquor store and strip club. The total footprint of the venue is 415 hectares - large enough to fit Sydney's Olympic stadium 25 times.
It’s Memorial Day weekend in these United States, and so there is pageantry and bombast. A marching band plays America the Beautiful. There’s a volley of gunfire, Taps, God Bless America, Back Home Again in Indiana, and the national anthem. The entire crowd stands, of course, hats off and hands on hearts.
Will Power puts his earplugs in, tugs his fire-protective balaclava over his face, pulls his helmet down and slips into the cockpit as four F-18 fighters whine overhead. And then comes the announcer, who sounds like a ringside boxing promoter.
“Fans, are you rrrrrready?”
“What a SIGHT!” he says as they scream towards the start.
“Ladies and gentlemen, here we go for the one hundredth running of the Indianapolis 500! The! Greatest! Spectacle! In! Racing! THE GREEN FLAG IS UP!”
And Will Power, car number 12, gunmetal grey, is off. It’s not a great race for our man, either. An improper pit exit sees him penalised early, sent to the back of the field. Yet within 10 laps he is in front of the field of 33. “If you’re leading around this place, you can drift into a rhythm. I can almost go into autopilot,” he says later. “If you’re in the train though, you’re always back and forth, trying to get runs, and your mind is always occupied with how to find clean air.”
He falls back again soon enough, then near the finish of the three-hour race he gets to 13, then 12, then 11, then 10, then 8. It looks like a charge but he runs low on fuel and splutters into 10th place. Not great. Not terrible. A rookie, Alexander Rossi, wins and pockets roughly $US2.5 million. Power’s cheque is for $US390,243, but all prize money goes to the team. His earnings are an undisclosed percentage.
The track is a jubilant mess, but not where Power sits, in the pit, his leg either side of a concrete wall, his fire suit pulled down to the waist. As he walks back to the garage drinking a bottle of cherry juice, the crew lets the air out of his tyres.
“He’s lost that aura of speed, but only temporarily,” says Malsher. “There’s always that air of vulnerability with Will. But when he’s flying, it’s honestly like, ‘Where the hell are the rest of them?’ They can’t keep up.”
The result doesn’t faze Power. He wins three of the next four races on the calendar, in fact, and is runner up in another. At the time of writing, he stands second in the championship, within striking distance of another crown.
“I’m at home in the paddock now, I’m in my own skin.”
His future is undecided, but he likes IndyCar. It is his end game, not a pathway to some place else. His longtime rival, Dario Franchitti, tried NASCAR, but failed. Jacques Villeneuve was one of few drivers to move successfully into Formula 1, but he was young. Power is 35 and can’t see himself racing past 40. He might move into driver coaching, or do something completely different.
But he would miss that fight to finish first. When he was young, he says, he practised as often as possible – cruising tracks for hours if only to feel all that raw energy inside the machine.
“Now, I could take or leave that. It doesn’t exhilarate me all that much,” he says, shrugging. “Now I only enjoy it when there’s a group of cars. I need some competition, someone to battle, something to beat.”