For a decade, Mark Webber has been Australia's great hope in international car racing.

Webber's won two Formula One races, was runner-up to his German teammate Sebastian Vettel in last Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix, but is unlikely to win a world championship.

Marcos Ambrose won two V8 Supercar titles and took off to tackle NASCAR - American stock car racing. He's done reasonably well, without winning at the top level.

There have been others. Ryan Briscoe and James Courtney got to the cusp of F1 racing, and 20-year-old Daniel Ricciardo is in the wings now with Webber's team, Red Bull Racing.

But the fairytale of the moment is Will Power in IndyCar racing.

A 29-year-old from Toowoomba, Sports Illustrated columnist Bruce Martin reckons Americans wonder whether his name is a publicity gimmick. They also reckon that, in the little they hear him talk, he sounds like Paul Hogan.

Last August, Power's back was broken in an horrific crash in California. He crested a rise in practice at the Sonoma track to discover another car had spun and stalled in his path. He could not avoid ramming it, broke four vertebrae in his back and was airlifted to hospital.

"I just remember I was in terrible pain," Power recalls. "And, for a split second, I thought: ‘There goes my career'. I remember moving my legs to make sure I wasn't paralysed."

He was only a part-time race driver at the time. He had been a rival of V8 Supercar star Will Davison in Australia's Formula Ford Championship in the early 2000s and they ventured to Europe as the best of Australia's open-wheeler hopefuls do.

Power won a lot of respect, he and Davison got to drive an F1 car for a day when fellow Australian Paul Stoddart owned the Minardi team, Webber took him under his wing, but F1's racing's doors did not open for Power and he wound up in America - in the Champ Car series.

He won a couple of times, and indeed took out the very last Champ Car race, but the reunification of American open-wheeler racing after an ugly split for more than a decade, and the demise of his Gold Coast backer Craig Gore, did him no favours.

Early last year a Brazilian who had won the Indianapolis 500 twice, Helio Castroneves, was embroiled in a big tax evasion case in the US.

Legendary team owner Roger Penske - an automotive billionaire who has fielded 15 cars that have won the Indy 500 - offered Power a drive while Castroneves was sidelined.

Penske already had an Australian in his team - Briscoe, who was to win three races and finish runner-up a record eight times as he came close to taking the Indy series title.

The Castroneves trial ended much quicker than anticipated and the Brazilian was soon back in his car, winning a third Indy 500.

But Penske - a maestro manager and motivator known as The Captain - had taken a shine to Power and gave him a start in that classic. He finished fifth.

Penske promised him a few more races. He won at Edmonton, Canada, in July. Then came the Sonoma crash.

It could so easily have been the end, but Penske again stuck by Power as he recovered, stretching his team to three cars full-time this season for the first time since 1994.

Power has won the first two rounds of the IndyCar championship - a new race in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and at St Petersburgh, Florida.

Teammates Briscoe and Castroneves were third and fourth in the St Petersburgh race.

Indy racing lost a lot of its fans and TV exposure during the great split, and it no longer comes to Queensland's Gold Coast.

The modern Indy Racing League was envisaged as a purely oval-track series for American drivers, but it now runs on all sorts of tracks with 10 nationalities represented.

It again boasts a class field, littered with ex-F1 drivers and Indy 500 winners and the darling of American motorsport, Danica Patrick.

Of his blistering start to this season, Power says: "It's good, but it's a very small percentage of what we have ahead of us."

Fifteen races remain - eight on ovals and seven on road or street courses that are Power's specialty.

He will be the man to beat on the road courses at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Alabama, this weekend, then on the streets of Long Beach, California.

Then come the tricky ovals that require expertise in the arts of drafting - firstly at Kansas Speedway, then the big one, the Indy 500.

It was at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, famed as The Brickyard, that Australia's triple F1 world champion Sir Jack Brabham taught the Americans that nimble rear-engined open-wheelers were better than their bulky front-engined roadsters.

But no Australian has been the victor in the Indy 500.

More than anyone, Penske knows what it takes to win there - giving Power, and Briscoe, a huge shot at making history next month.

Power is the third leg of the Penske dream team, running under different sponsorship to Briscoe and Castroneves.

At the tracks, Penske dons the headphones to direct strategy for Briscoe.

But at the moment Power is the blue-eyed boy.

Penske has had many of the finest drivers in American open-wheeler history - among them the late Mark Donohue, Rick Mears, Al Unser Junior, and the legendary Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi.

Power reminds Penske of Mears - the man revered at The Brickyard as Rocket Man and who he hired when he lost Mario Andretti to F1 in the late 1970s.

Together Penske and Mears won the Indy 500 four times (and three series titles).

The 500 is run on America's Memorial Day, May 30.

This year Power, or perhaps Briscoe, with the might of Penske, might just make it Australia Day in what The Brickyard bills as The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.