MVN - Most Valuable Network

Scott Dixon survives wild finish at Homestead

Polesitter takes lead in final ten laps, hangs on for win

One day, somebody will glance through an IndyCar Series record book and see last night’s GAINSCO Auto Insurance Indy 300 represented by a single line: “Pole Winner — Scott Dixon, Race Winner — Scott Dixon.” Chances are he or she will assume that the 2003 series champion had an easy time of it in the first race after American open-wheel unification.

But they will be wrong. While the Kiwi led 67 laps and had a stout car all race long, he only found himself in a position to win after race leader Tony Kanaan got tagged by the wrecked machine of rookie Ernesto “E.J.” Viso with six laps remaining. On the restart with three to go, Dixon passed the wounded Kanaan but still had to stave off Marco Andretti to seal his second career victory at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

After losing the 2007 IndyCar Series championship in the final turn of the final lap of the season, Dixon got his campaign for the 2008 title off on the right foot. But it was anything but easy. Afterwards, he told the press that he was gaining on Kanaan before the race-altering incident between him and Viso:

“We were catching him pretty quick, I think a mile an hour, two miles an hour a lap. So, what did we have, eight or nine laps to go. It would have been very close even if he didn’t have that incident. It was a damn shame to see him have such a silly little incident to take him out of the race.

“If we can have days where we didn’t really have the best car and come away with maximum points, that’s a big deal for us and the championship.”

As for Kanaan, he was leading Dixon by over two seconds at the time and appeared set to win in his adopted hometown. But after Viso’s wreck-and-contact with the No. 11 Team 7-Eleven machine damaged his car’s right-front suspension, Kanaan was forced to hand over the lead on the Lap 197 restart after leading the previous 15 laps.

He ended up a disappointing eighth, but the 2004 IndyCar champion told IndyCar.com’s Dave Lewandowski that he couldn’t do much during the incident:

“When somebody spins and he’s doing 230 miles an hour, you’re like, ‘Where should I go?’ I slowed down, he was on the bottom, so I went to the top. Then, all of a sudden he started to go to the top and I was trying to go to the bottom, so there was nothing I could do about it.

“The way I look at it, this is right where I finished here in 2004 and we know the way that year turned out.”

Even more galling for the Kanaan faithful was the fact that many of the other top contenders were forced to make a final pit stop for fuel and tires within the last 25-30 laps — leaving the Andretti Green Racing driver seemingly homefree in the closing stages.

In the end, the AGR camp had a mixed evening. Prized rookie Hideki Mutoh saw his night end after just 32 laps due to a mechanical failure on his No. 27 Formula Dream machine. But on the flip side, the Kanaan-Viso incident allowed Andretti to come home second after trying to battle Dixon for the win. Danica Patrick’s drive for a podium was stopped after her last pit stop on Lap 185, but she still came home sixth, one lap down.

Marco’s last-gasp attempt to stop Dixon fell short, but the third-year pilot was still pleased with his performance as he attempts to erase a sophomore season from Hell (11th in points; 10 DNFs). He felt that he and his team were exactly where they need to be in order to do that:

“We’ve done a lot of work, like I said before. We’re ready to go. I gained my confidence back on the ovals, which was our definite weak spot to start. And we’re hopefully going to be strong next weekend, as are a lot of other people. We just need to bring our A game, as I my engineer would say, every event.”

Finishing behind him in third was Dan Wheldon, who came close to making history. Heading into the race as the three-time defending champion at Homestead, Wheldon was forced to start 22nd after crashing in qualifying — putting his quest to become the first man to win four straight races at an IndyCar Series facility in serious jeopardy.

But in his backup machine, the 2005 Indy 500 winner picked the field apart from the drop of the green flag. By the time the field received the halfway signal from the flagstand, he had already driven up to third place and got past Andretti shortly afterwards for second before eventually giving the position back to him.

He would hail his Target Chip Ganassi Racing team for a job well done and while he was unable to take the win, he managed to wonder aloud if the loss could work out eventually:

“I was able to get up front pretty quickly, which was good. Actually on a long run, seemed to be very, very competitive. Just in that last stop, I lost a little bit of time. Unfortunately, that was kind of it…The last few years when I’ve won the first race, I haven’t done particularly well in the championship. Maybe this is a good omen.”

Wheldon also gave a shout-out to the transition teams from the Champ Car World Series that made their IndyCar debut last night, saying that they all put on an “admirable” effort in both the race and their whirlwind preparation following the unification announcement.

All IRL squads have been paired up with former Champ Car teams this season in technical partnerships. Wheldon’s TCGR squad has been helping along KV Racing Technology, who managed to take “best in class” status as their driver Oriol Servia took 12th place in the race, tops amongst IndyCar’s new breed of speed.

Considering that he brought his No. 5 machine home in one piece, the night can be considered a success for the Spanish driver. But from his point of view, it was an up-and-down outing:

“It was a long race, a long day at the office, which has good and bad things. Good because we definitely wanted to do the full race and gather as much data and information of the car and the ovals as we could. But it was long because we were so slow. It’s so much longer than [any] 500-mile race I’ve ever done.”

His teammate Will Power saw his night end after suffering a mechanical failure on Lap 24, the result of a run-in with Justin Wilson on a restart. Wilson soldiered on to 15th place for Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing, third amongst the transition drivers and one spot behind 14th-place finisher Franck Perera.

Mario Moraes finished the race running in 16th, while the rest of the new guys — Viso, Power, Enrique Bernoldi and Bruno Junqueira — suffered premature ends to their races thanks to either a wreck or handling and mechanical problems.

The next race for the IndyCar Series is the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg (Fla.) next Sunday, April 6.

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All quotes were taken from Saturday’s post-race transcript and the other linked stories in this article. The quotes have been attributed to their proper writers/organizations.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 2:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.