Scott Dixon on the Indy 500 and his season so far

We’ve done all the practice we can do at Indy – all except that last hour on Carb Day. And so already the first five races of the season seem a long time ago. The focus we require to work on the car and improve it for the Indy 500, to get everything just right over the past couple of weeks, pushes everything else out of your head.

When you think about how long the guys have been working on our superspeedway cars, even apart from the general work we do on all the cars in the off-season, it reminds you just what this race means to Chip and everyone who works for him. You saw that desire from the guys who fitted my new engine last Sunday in just 64 minutes, when it should take twice that amount of time. That’s amazing.

If you think about it, we were already outside the Fast Nine, because we’d struggled in Saturday qualifying, so what they were fighting so hard about was 10^th at best, or starting last. But what people forget, because we’re all caught up in the Indy 500, is that there’s a big amount of IndyCar championship points awarded for qualifying at Indy. I qualified 13^th and so we scored 21 points. If the boys had been just a bit slower and we hadn’t made it through tech inspection and out to the qualifying line in time, we’d have started 33^rd, which is worth just one point… And remember I won the title last year on a tie-breaker.  

Season so far

So that kind of brings us onto the season so far. Five races in, we’re second in the championship. Not bad, but obviously congratulations to Penske and Simon Pagenaud. They have been doing a phenomenal job, Simon’s a great driver and they’re on a roll.

I haven’t really analyzed the points situation, but from second place back, it’s very compressed and the result of Indy can change a lot and cause a really dramatic turn. Pagenaud’s lead is 76 points right now and it’s our job to stop that roll and gain back the ground we’ve lost.

St. Pete was weird because we had tear-offs, we had plastic bags and we had bagfuls of leaves all collected in our side pods that all needed scooped out at pitstops. It was like fall in Indiana. We’re not sure if it was because the race was run a couple weeks earlier or because of the truck race run before us, but the amount of crap in there was crazy.

I don’t think we as a team did enough to protect our radiators, because all our cars had the same issue at some point to a greater or lesser extent, so I can tell you our protocol has changed since then. Frustrating, because I think it was only us and Montoya who had fresh reds for the end and so without the problem, we might have had a fun fight. Instead, we got seventh.

Then we bounced back with the win in Phoenix. It’s hard to know what might have happened if Helio and Montoya hadn’t had their problems. We were a lot faster than Juan on the straights, but passing was tough. Maybe it would have worked out in our favor anyway on a restart or a pitstop exchange, because I've got to give major credit to our team for giving me great pitstops. Fantastic.

But I hope in future we can make the racing at Phoenix a little bit better – a wider driving line. I think we have the tools and options to do it, but we need to figure out if we add downforce or take a ton away. We can’t fluff around in the middle ground and present a bad show.

Long Beach controversy

I’ve probably said all I need to say on Pagenaud beating us out of the pits at Long Beach, crossing the pitlane blend line. Looking at it a month down the road, the fact is that you’re gonna have to deal with that stuff all the way through your career, aren’t you? We didn’t even consider an official protest because once it’s done it’s done.

But I think the rule needs to change because for breaking that rule, the first penalty is a warning, the second is a drive-through – one too mild, one too harsh. Maybe the first should be to reverse positions.

I think the stewards are still trying to find their feet and they’ve done a better job over the last few races. But they need to get rid of warnings because to anyone with commonsense, a warning doesn’t mean anything. All the warnings are done in the driver briefing before the race.

Having said all that, I also think we missed out to the #22 on the pit sequence. We had to go to fuel-save mode which probably cost us a good 1.5sec, so that scenario where he could beat us should never have occurred.  

Barber bruises, frustrating GP of Indy

Still, I was happy with the season up to Barber, where we could have had a productive day but got backed into a quandary pretty quickly when Sebastien Bourdais spun us at Turn 5 on the first lap. We had to restart at the back and we had to shift strategies and pit extremely early, which meant getting extremely high mileage. And if you pit early on the first stop, you’re hosed for the next two as well. Plus, unfortunately we had a bunch of guys around us doing the same thing, hoping for a caution.

Our car pace was pretty good, even with the left-rear pod broken by Bourdais, and then the left front damaged as I was trying to get going again. It’s hard to know how we might have finished if the incident hadn't happened but our competition should have been Pagenaud and Rahal up front. It’s a shame our streak of six podiums in a row there has now been broken.

The GP of Indy was what I would describe as a very blah race – you know… A frustrating seventh place. It seemed everything we did was wrong!

We screwed up qualifying – me and Juan [Montoya] and Will [Power] all tripped over each other on our fast runs, and just gave that pole to Simon. That meant I got caught behind Jack Hawksworth for a while in the race, but got past, made up the gap, got Monty during the pitstops, and then we think on the next restart the front wing got broken and we lost 20 percent aero. We tried to wind in more on the next pitstop but it just wasn’t reacting to it.

So that ended our day there. We couldn’t get close to anyone through the corners without the front end washing out, so coming off that right-hander onto the straight, we spent the whole straight trying to draft up instead of being there and ready in the brake zone. And as far as strategy was concerned, between myself and the team, we just didn’t get it right, so I was having to save fuel in the final stint.

Pagenaud won again but points-wise he isn't out of bounds for anybody. A couple of bad races for him and a couple of good ones for us and we’re back in it.  

Now for the big one

As I mentioned at the start, we’re not starting the Indy 500 anywhere near where we wanted to be – but it doesn’t matter around here. As long as you’ve got a good racecar, you can come from anywhere on the grid. The Chevrolet race pace looks pretty strong, and all you want as a driver is to be on equal footing.

I don’t think it would benefit us to treat this 100^th Running of the Indy 500 as any different from any other race. Obviously it is hugely significant and there’s a huge wow factor to this event but you can’t let it get to you. My job as a driver and our job as a team is the same as everywhere – to win. We can think about what it means afterward.

That can be tough, as I discovered this week because the significance of the race is what everyone wants to ask you; I think all of us will feel a lot more comfortable when we get our helmets on.

We get one more chance to do that on Friday, and then we wait around a bit longer for the biggest race in the world on Sunday.

Thanks for reading this. I hope we need to do the next column next Monday as I head off on the Indy 500 winner’s traditional media tour!

Scott

Scott was talking to David Malsher