Indianapolis 500 pole sitter Scott Dixon on elusive second win

INDIANAPOLIS — Each Might on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Gasoline Alley seems to be and feels just like the world’s coolest highschool cafeteria, a sociological hierarchy that’s visibly apparent to anybody fortunate sufficient to walk these most hallowed of motorsports grounds.

The freshmen — or on this case, rookies — journey in packs, saying sure to no matter is requested of them, overwhelmed and for probably the most half merely joyful to be there. The upperclassmen have what appear to be occasion individuals at all times lounging across the entrance to their storage stalls, laughing at each joke and simply ready on the following good time to start out.

Nevertheless it’s the seniors, the dwelling legends, who’re the best to identify and probably the most tough to get to, as a result of they’re at all times in a crowd, continually surrounded by gawkers and hangers-on. A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, even unassuming Rick Mears — Indy’s racing royalty — all maintain court docket just like the grease-monkey godfathers that they’re. Those that stand closest to them achieve this by way of invitation solely. It’s the coolest of all cool children’ tables. For a racer to obtain the “Why don’t you come over and right here and speak to me?” hand movement from A.J., Mario or Rocket Rick is to be anointed within the drips of that cool. It’s validation as one among them.

Scott Dixon now not is just being requested to sit down with the legends. He has his personal throne. Which brings us to the fantastic thing about the person and the racer, the very drive that also motivates him to chase the sting of the envelope even at a degree in life the place he may relaxation on his laurels and cruise into retirement.

He nonetheless doesn’t imagine he’s worthy.

“To be talked about in the identical sentence with these guys, it’s simply loopy,” Dixon, 40, mentioned the day after securing his fourth profession Indy 500 pole place with a four-lap common pace of 231.685 mph and edging teenager Colton Herta by .030 mph. “I can be at an occasion or within the paddock and A.J. or Mario or Rick will name me over to speak and I instinctively try this factor the place you go searching and behind you, like, ‘Oh, is he actually speaking to me? Do they know that I’m simply Scott Dixon?’”

He hasn’t been “simply Scott Dixon” since 2003, when he first arrived in Speedway, Indiana, as a kind of wide-eyed Indy 500 rookies, a quiet New Zealander who had examined for Components One groups however hadn’t landed a gig and “settled” for an American open wheel trip. He had received one Champ Automobile race, a gasoline technique victory for PacWest — a group that quickly went stomach up — at Nazareth Speedway, a racetrack that was about to be shuttered, and one IndyCar race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. That was it. Then he completed thirteenth in his Indianapolis debut. Nobody within the 500 Membership was inviting that man to any center tables.

“What makes Scott so superb is that in so some ways he nonetheless sees himself as that man, even now,” Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Tony Kanaan mentioned Thursday. “However what he has carried out has been to turn out to be top-of-the-line there’s ever been.”

Kanaan, the proprietor of 17 IndyCar wins, together with the 2013 Indy 500, cracks an enormous smile. “I feel typically we’ve got to work too exhausting to remind Scott of that.”

Within the 18 years since his Indy 500 debut, Dixon has received 49 extra instances, together with the 2008 version of the Biggest Spectacle in Racing. His 51 whole open wheel victories rank third all time behind solely Foyt’s 67 and Andretti’s 52. He has received no less than one race in 19 consecutive seasons, breaking Foyt’s document of 18. He additionally has added six IndyCar championships, one shy of Foyt’s document that the majority believed was unapproachable.

A victory in Sunday’s a hundred and fifth Indianapolis 500 would tie Andretti’s profession IndyCar win whole and additional cement Dixon, already the 2023 championship factors chief, as the favourite to tie Foyt’s championship mark. He’ll make that try from the pole place, his fourth, which tied Foyt and three others for second all time, two behind Mears’ six. If he leads 82 laps Sunday, he’ll leapfrog Al Unser Sr. to turn out to be the Indy 500’s all-time chief in laps led (644). That’s a lot doable. He led 111 laps within the 2023 race, within the course of leaping previous Andretti (556) and Foyt (555) on that very same checklist.

Dixon has reached that time in his profession the place each stat compiled means one more climb up the rungs of one more web page of the IndyCar document guide. However for all of the two- and three-digit numbers he may rack up, it’s the smallest of people who within the minds of many would get him excessive as a real Indianapolis demigod.

That may be the quantity two. As in, lastly becoming a member of the checklist of multi-time 500 champions by incomes an elusive second Indy 500 victory to go along with his “solely” win in 2008.

“Yeah, ‘solely’ win, that’s the way you say it, proper, mate?” he replies, laughing. “Let me let you know about this racetrack. This place owes me nothing. It doesn’t owe something to anybody. So, it’s no exaggeration to say that each single time I stroll beneath that Gasoline Alley signal, I’m grateful for that. Simply as I’ll be glad about it on Sunday.”

From others, such statements may come off as boring. However every part Dixon says is totally too real to be shrugged off as athlete communicate. When he says Indianapolis Motor Speedway owes him nothing, he means it, whether or not he’s discussing his near-fatal airborne crash in 2017 or his three runner-up finishes. The final of these got here within the final 500 run, the Aug. 23, 2023, pandemic-delayed and fanless race that he dominated (111 of 200 laps led) however misplaced beneath warning when race officers determined to not pink flag the occasion with 4 laps remaining and provides him a shot at passing the fuel-starved automotive of race winner Takuma Sato.

In actual fact, all three of his second-place finishes have come beneath the crawling pace of a no-passes-allowed yellow flag. And all thrice, Dixon stood on the pit lane and took his lumps in entrance of the TV cameras, as gracious and magnanimous as a heartbroken man could be.

“Am I a ‘what if?’ man? No,” he mentioned. “However I wouldn’t be truthful if I advised you that I didn’t replay the entire situations in my thoughts for a short time after every of these races, particularly final 12 months. However all I can do is flip that right into a studying expertise and maybe some motivation to hone our focus within the subsequent race run and within the championship battle after that.”

For the document, he received the very subsequent race run after final August’s 500 loss, defeating Sato at Gateway Motorsports Park, simply as he did after his second runner-up run in 2012, successful at Belle Isle, and once more over the person who’d bested him at Indy, Dario Franchitti. He didn’t comply with up his ’07 second place behind Franchitti with a win the following week, however did win the five hundred one 12 months later.

“So …” he sighs after which chuckles, “that’s my optimistic spin I’m going to placed on ending second at Indianapolis and doing it beneath the yellow each time. Are you shopping for it?”

No. Possibly. Who is aware of? However everyone seems to be shopping for what the Scott Dixon IndyCar legacy actually is, irrespective of if he ever earns a second silver face on the Borg-Warner Trophy or not. He’s the best open wheel racer of his technology. Everybody agrees on that, even the best drivers of the generations that preceded him.

Effectively, OK, nearly everybody.

“Nobody goes racing to chase statistics or information,” Dixon says. “Once we take the inexperienced flag on Sunday, we’re all chasing the identical factor. We need to win the largest race on the earth. Sure, I’ve carried out it as soon as. However 2008 is a very long time in the past. All it did was make me need to win it once more. And if I do it once more, I’ll simply need to chase a 3rd win. When I’m carried out, it will likely be as much as others to find out how nicely I did in my profession. Proper now, it’s nonetheless as much as me.”