IndyCar: If Scott Dixon is going to be beaten, it needs to happen now

By Asher Fair | Aug 29, 2020

Scott Dixon, Chip Ganassi Racing, IndyCar, Indy 500 (Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images) /

If Scott Dixon is going to be beaten by somebody in 2020 IndyCar championship, it will be because of this upcoming race weekend. Otherwise, you might as well forget it.

Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon opened up the 2020 IndyCar season with a bang at Texas Motor Speedway, and he hasn’t looked back.

The winner of the season’s first three races, who won just two races all of last year, has opened up an 84-point lead over Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in second place in the championship standings following the seventh race of the season, the 104th running of the Indy 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The next closest driver is Arrow McLaren SP’s Pato O’Ward, who sits another 33 points behind Newgarden. O’Ward has not yet won a race in his career.

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If the five-time champion is to be beaten and prevented from becoming just the second driver in IndyCar history to win six championships, it needs to happen this weekend at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.

That is because this is a doubleheader weekend, and there will be two opportunities to make up points on the 40-year-old New Zealander at a track where he has never won and finished in 15th place or worse in two of his four starts. His gap is already well above the gap that can be made up in a single race, and that is no surprise, given that he has recorded five top two finishes and six top five finishes through seven races.

Plus, after this weekend, there are only three races left on the schedule, and to make matters even worse for the underdogs, IndyCar has scrapped the double points element of this year’s season finale on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida, marking the first season without a double points-paying season finale since 2013.

Sure, there will technically be five races left on the calendar, but two of them were postponed from early August and not have not yet been rescheduled. Even with those two races, this season is still slated to be tied for the shortest since 2001.

And those two races also happen to be races at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Dixon happens to be a six-time race winner at the track.

Do you really expect him to have two, not just one, awful races and lose a championship at the track he has practically owned for the last decade-plus?

If someone is going to challenge Dixon for this year’s IndyCar title, which nobody has shown any signs of doing so far this season, it needs to happen this weekend at the four-turn, 1.25-mile (2.012-kilometer) oval in Madison, Illinois. If it doesn’t, you can practically hand him his sixth ring.

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Both races of this weekend’s Bommarito Automotive Group Race to MEGA Savings 250s, one today and one tomorrow, are set to be broadcast live on NBC Sports Network beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET.