Racer - Winter 2013

to go, he was 92 points behind series leader Helio Castroneves. But at the very next race, Dixon led Charlie Kimball and Franchitti to a Ganassi 1-2-3 finish, the irony being that it came on the Pocono tri-oval, and thus owed nothing to the work done at Sebring! Instead, it was the race smarts of the team that prevailed (see sidebar on page 42) – the choices made by their respective race engineers, Ben Bretzman, Bradley Goldberg and Chris Simmons, and the strategies issued by Mike Hull, Tom Wurtz and Chip himself.

If that victory was down to tactics, though, the work at Sebring paid off big-time in Toronto’s double-header. Had Dixon not made errors on his qualifying runs for Race 1, he’d probably have taken pole. In the race, although it took until lap

61 for him to hit the front, each car ahead of him had looked like tethered prey and the victory was almost inevitable. For Race 2, after finally nailing his first pole of the year, Dixon left the field behind.

Suddenly he was second in the title race, only 29 points adrift of Castroneves, who’d pocketed a sixth and a second in Canada.

“I thought it was game on from that
point,” says Scott, “because any time you
win three races in a row, that’s special, and
not something you do often in your career.

“But then at Sonoma and Baltimore,
we were kicked in the crotch again….”
Even before those disasters, his progress
had been halted at Mid-Ohio, where Dixon
had won four times in the last six seasons.

This year, Scott – like other fast guys – was jumped as the No. 9 team tried to make a tortuous two-stop strategy work, and he was beaten to sixth by Castroneves.

Yet far more damaging were the pit lane incident at Sonoma, in which he hit one of Power’s pit crew and served a drive-through penalty, and the restart in Baltimore where Will unknowingly bounced Scott into a wall.

It left the latter facing a 49-point deficit to Castroneves with three rounds to go.

A family tragedy put such matters into perspective over the ensuing five-week gap, and that makes it even more admirable that Scott returned to action for the Houston double-header with his sense of resolve as sharp as ever.

One of the aspects of Dixon’s season that appeals to all red-blooded race fans is that not once did he drive a cautious race, even with the title at stake. To an extent, circumstances forced an all-or-nothing approach to races because the double whammy of 15th in Sonoma/19th in Baltimore meant that, until the season finale, Scott was always in the role of

2013 INdycaR sERIEs

In Toronto, Dixon completed his first three-wins-in-a-row run since 2007. Also, plucked from our Facts ’n’ Trivia Dept., the second TO win was Dixon’s first from a standing start.