INDIANAPOLIS — Each Could 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 essentially the most half merely pleased to be there. The upperclassmen have what appear like social gathering individuals all the time lounging across the entrance to their storage stalls, laughing at each joke and simply ready on the following good time to begin.
However it’s the seniors, the dwelling legends, who’re the simplest to identify and essentially the most troublesome to get to, as a result of they’re all the time in a crowd, always surrounded by gawkers and hangers-on. A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, even unassuming Rick Mears — Indy’s racing royalty — all maintain courtroom 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 youngsters’ tables. For a racer to obtain the “Why do not you come over and right here and discuss 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 certainly one of them.
Scott Dixon not is solely being requested to take a seat with the legends. He has his personal throne. Which brings us to the great thing about the person and the racer, the very pressure that also motivates him to chase the sting of the envelope even at some extent in life the place he might relaxation on his laurels and cruise into retirement.
He nonetheless does not imagine he is worthy.
“To be talked about in the identical sentence with these guys, it is simply loopy,” Dixon, 40, mentioned the day after securing his fourth profession Indy 500 pole place with a four-lap common velocity of 231.685 mph and edging teen Colton Herta by .030 seconds. “I shall 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 am 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 System One groups however hadn’t landed a gig and “settled” for an American open wheel journey. He had received one Champ Automotive 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 wonderful 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 performed has been to change into among the finest there’s ever been.”
Kanaan, the proprietor of 17 IndyCar wins, together with the 2013 Indy 500, cracks an enormous smile. “I feel typically now we have 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 Best Spectacle in Racing. His 51 complete open wheel victories rank third all time behind solely Foyt’s 67 and Andretti’s 52. He has received at the least one race in 19 consecutive seasons, breaking Foyt’s file of 18. He additionally has added six IndyCar championships, one shy of Foyt’s file that the majority believed was unapproachable.
A victory in Sunday’s one hundred and fifth Indianapolis 500 would tie Andretti’s profession IndyCar win complete and additional cement Dixon, already the 2021 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 change into the Indy 500’s all-time chief in laps led (644). That is lots doable. He led 111 laps within the 2020 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 file e book. However for all the two- and three-digit numbers he may rack up, it is the smallest of those who within the minds of many would get him excessive as a real Indianapolis demigod.
That might 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 is the way you say it, proper, mate?” he replies, laughing. “Let me inform you about this racetrack. This place owes me nothing. It does not 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 all the things Dixon says is fully too real to be shrugged off as athlete converse. 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, 2020, pandemic-delayed and fanless race that he dominated (111 of 200 laps led) however misplaced below 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 reality, all three of his second-place finishes have come below the crawling velocity of a no-passes-allowed yellow flag. And all 3 times, 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 would not be truthful if I instructed you that I did not replay all the eventualities in my thoughts for a short while 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 file, 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 did not 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 is my optimistic spin I will placed on ending second at Indianapolis and doing it below the yellow each time. Are you shopping for it?”
No. Perhaps. 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.
Properly, OK, nearly everybody.
“Nobody goes racing to chase statistics or information,” Dixon says. “After we take the inexperienced flag on Sunday, we’re all chasing the identical factor. We wish to win the largest race on this planet. Sure, I’ve performed it as soon as. However 2008 is a very long time in the past. All it did was make me wish to win it once more. And if I do it once more, I am going to simply wish to chase a 3rd win. When I’m performed, it will likely be as much as others to find out how properly I did in my profession. Proper now, it’s nonetheless as much as me.”