Burning desire
Drivers, family say he wants to win more than anyone
Indy 500 pole-sitter Scott Dixon doesn’t show emotion, but inside he’s all about winning,
Picture a chubby 14-year-old Scott Dixon sitting in his New Zealand Formula Vee car predicting the future.
“Go into (Formula) Ford and get graded for my license, hopefully I can, then go to Atlantic,” the young Dixon said of moving up the racing ranks. “Then hopefully Indy cars or something.”
He was grinning ear-to-ear on the YouTube video. It was as if he saw everything coming over the next 20-some years.
Dixon has done nearly nothing but win — fourth all time in wins, fourth in runner-up finishes, fifth in podiums, sixth in top-fives — and he’s still pushing that car. He’s still pushing himself, because each loss nags at his mind.
Dixon is known for having no emotions. They call him the Iceman. But the woman who knows him best disagrees.
“I think that’s actually his winning secret,” Emma Davies-Dixon said Sunday after her husband won the pole for the Indianapolis 500. “He’s very emotional.”
No, Dixon never shows that emotion, but maybe it’s because this level of success is what he demands of himself. This is what he expects. Everyone might not see it, but those close to him say he wants to win more than anyone else.
It’s the first thing his teammates say about him.
“Scott, in particular, is probably the most competitive or fastest driver I’ve had as a teammate in my 15 years of career,” Max Chilton said.
“The only person he really cares about what they think are the three ladies he goes home to, because, other than winning, that’s probably what matters most to him,” Charlie Kimball said of Davies-Dixon and their daughters, Poppy and Tilly.
Dixon enters the week as the pole-sitter for the 101st Indianapolis 500, putting him in good position to win that second 500 he’s been saying he wants so badly. And when a reporter asked Tony Kanaan about Dixon’s legacy and listed those rankings on the all-time lists, he said only one of them mattered.
“All he cares about is winning,” Kanaan said. “He doesn’t care about any of the numbers that you mentioned. I don’t think he cares if he’s as popular as me or not. He’s here for pure racing.”
Where does that come from? There’s something inside somebody that pushes them to be as great as Dixon. With Dixon, that something is his own expectations.
He said it himself in his trailer last week while trying to figure out why he might care about winning more than most, a claim he neither confirms nor denies. He said everybody in IndyCar comes from different backgrounds and walks of life. Dixon, the winningest active driver, comes from New Zealand.
In New Zealand, Dixon said, people are expected to do things themselves. People there would not even think of hiring someone to mow their lawns. When the garage breaks, a Kiwi is out there himself with wood and nails and fixing it.
This isn’t just Dixon as anecdotal evidence for all of New Zealand. Social psychologist Geert Hofstede did a study on the values of each nation. New Zealand’s most extreme value was individualism. People are expected to be self-reliant.
Dixon isn’t as bothered when he and the team do everything they can and don’t win. It’s when everything is running right, when he has a chance to win and he fails, that makes his blood boil.
“Those are the circumstances that keep you up at night,” Dixon said. “You replay it a lot. You think of many ways you should have done it differently.”
But even when he wins, he isn’t jumping around making a scene. He’s still relatively even-keeled.
People say he wants to win more than anybody else, but he doesn’t even show much emotion when it happens. So what does he even get out of winning?
“I think it’s expected,” he said. “I think it’s expected of us to do that.”
And with each win, he said, he expects it just a little more. It never subsides, Davies-Dixon said. Because the Kiwi in him tells him that when he knows he can do something, he is expected to keep doing it. He keeps searching for ways to improve, ways to hone his edge.
Davies-Dixon, a former British 800-meter champ, said she thinks her husband is an even better athlete now than when they met more than a decade ago. She takes some of the credit — she’s helped him train the last few years.
Longtime friend and teammate Dario Franchitti said in a January interview with NBC Sports that when he spoke to Dixon on the phone, Dixon was dropping his daughters off at school and going straight to the gym.
“I really think his best years are ahead of him,” Davies-Dixon said.
Dixon gets uneasy trying to explain why they call him the Iceman. He said maybe it’s because he’s monotone. That’s not it. Maybe it’s because he has thick skin. Not quite. He said he isn’t superemotional. Bingo.
Kanaan had just walked in the room when he heard this.
“Zero,” Kanaan said, making the shape with his hand.
For example, Dixon and Franchitti were robbed outside of Taco Bell at gunpoint Sunday night, hours after Dixon won the Indy 500 pole. Dixon reportedly had a gun pointed at his head, and when he talked to Kanaan about it, he wasn’t particularly rattled.
“Nothing really affects the guy,” he said. “He was telling the story like, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ ”
According to the Associated Press, Dixon only went to Taco Bell because a McDonald’s next door was closed for renovations. McDonald’s is a sponsor of Dixon’s team. But he did admit to the AP the robbery “was definitely shocking, disbelief for the most part. ... It will make you feel really small again.”
When Dixon was trying to explain what winning does for him and why he doesn’t go crazy when he wins, he said he enjoys it in his own way. He said, in those moments, he’s just happy for his family.
So what does Dixon get out of the winning he craves so much?
He gets his daughters celebrating by his side, with Davies-Dixon sitting across the podium blowing kisses and mouthing, “I love you.”