The racing career of a young Center Grove driver has quite literally taken a few new twists and turns this year.
Will Edwards had been racing around oval tracks for most of his life, first on the Quarter Midget circuit and then for two years on the Mel Kenyon Midget Series. But fueled by dreams of one day driving IndyCar, the 15-year-old went in another direction this season.
The Center Grove sophomore is now one of the youngest drivers on the F4 US Championship Series, which serves as an introduction to open-wheel racing for many IndyCar and Formula 1 hopefuls. Edwards races against drivers from several countries, ranging in age from 13 to 50.
“We knew from pretty early on that this was more the route to go if you want to run Indianapolis,” he said, “so we decided that I’m of the age where if it’s going to happen, we need to start working on it.”
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Getting acclimated has been a challenge — Edwards has yet to pick up any points in an F4 event. But the results aren’t as important to him this year; he’s more concerned with making progress on mastering the nuances of the road-course tracks, which are a completely different animal than the ovals he’s been accustomed to.
Instead of dealing strictly with gradual left-hand turns, Edwards is now making harder cuts in both directions — and doing so at a much higher speed. Kenyon midget cars top out at around 90 miles per hour, while the F4 cars get up to about 140.
The speed adjustment, Edwards says, hasn’t been as drastic as one might think.
“That 50 or 60 miles an hour or whatever it is, it seems like it’s a lot,” he said, “but when you’re in a lay-down car that has that aero, that downforce, it just feels stable. You don’t really notice it as much.”
The turns, on the other hand, have taken some getting used to. He prepared for the F4 season by putting in countless hours on simulators and doing test runs on various tracks. Gearing up for a race usually begins with driving a simulator at home, then doing so with coaching at iAdvance Motorsports in Indianapolis, then walking the track with driving coach Kyle Tilley before doing actual test runs.
By qualifying day, the hope is to have every nook and cranny of a track mapped out — picking out visuals for each of his braking and turning points so that every move can be timed perfectly.
Anything less than perfect is disastrous.
“If you do one little mistake wrong,” Edwards said, “all of a sudden your whole lap is done.”
There have been mistakes this season, to be sure, but for Edwards this is all part of a deliberate process to get to where he wants to go. The tentative plan is to race F4 this year and next, then hopefully move over to the USF2000 series, which is the first rung on the Road to Indy ladder.
As Edwards continues to work his way up — his father, Toney, calls it “swimming into the funnel” because fewer and fewer drivers remain at each level — he can feel his dreams gradually coming into greater focus.
“The more you move up, the more you start thinking about it and trying to put the pieces together to try to make it happen,” Will Edwards said.
Some of those pieces, obviously, cost quite a bit of money. Will’s parents, Toney and Kimberly, have put a lot into their son’s racing throughout the years — and F4 has certainly been the most expensive stage of the journey thus far.
It requires a much greater commitment than, say, buying your child a guitar and signing him or her up for lessons. Fortunately, the Edwards clan is all in.
“If he was willing to commit the time and the effort to do the best he could do, we were going to commit to buying the car,” Toney Edwards said. “It’s kind of a leap of faith.”
That leap hasn’t paid immediate dividends in the F4 points standings, but Edwards wasn’t really expecting it to. He’s using this year to learn and build a foundation for the long climb upward, and he feels comfortable with how that process is coming along.
“It was hard to adjust,” he said. “Going to a road course is so much different. There’s so many different techniques, and it’s way more complex.
“So far, the progress that we’ve had has been steady, so we’re just looking forward to keeping that rate of progressing.”
