Dixon surges to IndyCar points lead
With win at Texas, driver passes Power, who falls to third.
Even FORT WORTH, TEXAS — with all the speed, Scott Dixon still hadn’t led a lap all season when he left Indianapolis last month.
Now with two wins in a span of eight days, four-time IndyCar Series champ Dixon heads into the back half of the season as the points leader. Both previous times he won at Texas, like he just did for a third time with a dominating performance, Dixon also won the season title.
“We won two races and led a bunch of laps. That’s a positive,” Dixon said after his win late Saturday night at the 1½-mile Texas oval, a week after the No. 9 Chip Ganassi Racing car also went to Victory Lane in the first race of the Detroit doubleheader.
“We had great speed at the start of the year. I was disappointed with how it went down at St. Pete, how it went down at Long Beach,” he said. “The speed has been there. Unfortunately, we’ve either made mistakes as a team, I made a mistake. We just didn’t really hit our stride. It’s nice to finally show the speed the car has.”
After leading the last 119 laps at Texas in the middle race of the 17-event IndyCar series — with eight before and eight after — Dixon took over the points lead from Will Power, who dropped to third. Alexander Rossi moved up a spot to second.
Dixon also quickly broke a tie with Michael Andretti for thirdmost wins in Indy-car history
with his 43rd career vic- tory, now behind only A.J. Foyt’s 67 and Mario Andretti’s 52. Dixon, the 37-year-old from New Zealand, started in CART in 2001 and debuted in IndyCar two years later with his first season championship.
At this season’s opener in St. Petersburg, Dixon was penalized for what IndyCar deemed avoidable contact when he ran into the back of Takuma Sato’s car. He restarted at the rear of the field, and eventually fin- ished sixth.
In Long Beach, Dixon got a penalty for entering a closed pit lane during a caution and went on to finish 11th. That is the only time he’s finished worse than sixth.
While Power and Ed Car- penter, the top two finish- ers in the Indianapolis 500, were both called for avoid- able contact with rookies in separate incidents that knocked them out at Texas, there were no issues at all for Dixon.
F1: Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel won the Canadian Grand Prix after leading the race from the pole to the check- ered flag. With the victory, Vettel took a one-point lead over Mercedes’ Lewis Ham- ilton in the Formula One standings.
Vettel picked up his second career victory at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve and the first for Ferrari in Montreal since Michael Schumacher won three in a row from 2002-04. Valtteri Bottas was second in his Mercedes, about six seconds back. Max Verstappen was third and the other Red Bull car, driven by Daniel Ricciardo, was fourth. Hamilton, who came into the weekend leading the championship standings, came in fifth.
It’s Vettel’s 50th career win and his third of the season.