IndyCar champion Will Power credits career confidence to wife’s ‘uncanny’ premonitions

MONTEREY, California – Will Power has learned to trust the gut feelings of his wife Liz, who always seems to know when her two-time IndyCar champion husband arrives at a career-defining moment.

“She has good intuition,” the Australian said in his typically droll understatement.

Or maybe a better way of framing it might be that she has an uncanny knack for predicting the future.

There was the time in 2008 when Liz talked Will out of the only racing deal he had for the following season, insisting that an opportunity would materialize out of the blue with an IndyCar powerhouse. When Will won the biggest race of his life in 2018, Liz (a worrywart who admits “I don’t hide that very well”) was serene throughout May in the expectation that an Indy 500 win was imminent.

So when Power began to fret in February while standing in the kitchen of their Troutman, North Carolina, home a week before the 2022 NTT IndyCar Series season opener, Liz naturally delivered another morale-boosting premonition of clarity, confidence and inner peace.

This would be the year Will broke Mario Andretti’s mark for career pole positions and captured his second title.

“He was getting nervous, obviously like pre-nerve jitters before the start of a season,” Liz told NBC Sports. “I told him, ‘Will, I know that you’re going to beat his record. You’re going to do it. And I honestly believe you’re going to win the championship, too. You’re going to do it in grand fashion. I just know it.

“And so all throughout the year, too, I kept telling him, when he would get nervous and kind of down, I was like, ‘I know you’re doing it! I don’t know why I know you’re doing it, but I know you’re doing it!’ ”

Over the course of one memorable weekend on the Monterey