Dixon cleans up at Toronto Indy,
Target Chip Ganassi driver now in running to win series championship
TORONTO Two checkered flags, $100,000 US in bonus money and a move up to second place in the IZOD IndyCar standings. For Scott Dixon, it was quite the weekend.
Or rather, it has been quite the week.
The Target Chip Ganassi Racing driver, who won his first race of the year on July 7 at Pocono Raceway, continued his success in Toronto with back-to-back checkered flags in Saturday and Sunday’s Honda Indy Toronto. Now, with three wins in the last eight days and some extra spending cash for his team, Dixon has suddenly become a favourite to capture the series championship.
“It’s a nice added bonus for us this weekend, but we’re here for the points,” Dixon, who has 396 points, said of the prize money he won for capturing both races of the doubleheader. “It’s been a hell of a swing over a seven-day period. We were 92 points out and now we’re 29 out, so it’s nice to put a little pressure on [series leader Helio Castroneves] and hopefully keep it going.”
Castroneves, who has 425 points this season, finished second; Sebastien Bourdais, who was second in Saturday’s race, ended up in third.
Montreal’s Alex Tagliani was Canada’s top finisher in 10th, while Oakville, Ont., native James Hinchcliffe was last among running cars in 21st, after starting three laps down because of a faulty throttle before the race even began.
“I was just going through the routine of the standing start and as soon as I put my foot on the throttle it stuck 100 per cent and that was about a minute before they were giving the command to start,” said Hinchcliffe. “We tried WD-40 but that wasn’t the magic fix. We had to replace the pedal so we were down three laps right off the bat.”
Dixon managed to keep his nose clean and avoid danger in Saturday’s caution-filled race. But as the pole sitter on Sunday, he simply was too fast for the competition. In a race that resembled the tedium of Formula One, complete with a standing start for the first time in 2007, Dixon led 81 of 85 laps. The only time he was not leading was when he was in the pits for fuel or a quick tire change.
It was an impressive — if not anti-climatic — race for the New Zealand native, who Bourdais said “was in a league of his own.”
For Dixon, it certainly appears that way. While he got off to a slow start to the season with just one podium finish in his first 10 races, the 32-yearold appears to be heating up at the right time. He now has to wait three weeks to try and keep his streak going at the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio. But considering he has won the race four times, the outlook looks favourable.
“I think it’s still going to be a tough battle,” he said of winning the overall championship. “I still like the look of the tracks coming up. I think we’re in the hunt.”
From holding two races to implementing a standing start for the first time, this weekend was loaded with gimmicks partly intended to spice up the event. The results were hit or miss. While fans packed the grandstand and were treated to two races that counted for points in the series, drivers found the backto-back races tiring and bit unbalanced.
“Scott Dixon gets 100 points,” said Hinchcliffe, who finished in eighth on Saturday. “How come we don’t get two races in Iowa [where Hinchcliffe won this season]? That would be awesome for us.
“You either have to have doubleheaders at all of them or none of them, and I’ve said that since they announced these things. It’s not fair and we as a team didn’t have particularly strong cars here and we get penalized twice as much ... it’s unfortunate how it works.”
Again, for Dixon it worked out well. So well that he might have been wishing it had been a triple-header.
“I like the doubleheaders,” said Dixon. “Obviously, they’ve been working for us, so we probably want to keep them around. I could take them or leave them, as well.”