IndyCar: Scott Dixon's championship sits in rarified air

Scott Dixon led the championship standings after every single race on the 2020 IndyCar schedule, an extraordinarily rare feat.

Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon took the lead of the IndyCar championship standings with a victory in the season opener at Texas Motor Speedway back in early June, and he ended up never looking back.

Over the course of the entire 14-race season, the newly crowned six-time champion never relinquished that lead.

He won the championship by 16 points (537 to 521) over Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in second place in the standings.

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Newgarden made a late charge, which saw him finish higher than Dixon in each of the last six races, win three of them, and take 101 points out of a 117-point lead, but it wasn’t enough to secure his third title.

Winning six titles is rare enough as it is; it hadn’t been done since A.J. Foyt, who retired as a seven-time champion, won his sixth title back in 1975. But Dixon’s title belongs in rarified air for another reason: he achieved the rare feat of never sitting lower than first place in the standings throughout a season, something that even he had never managed to do in five previous title runs.

That feat was last achieved in the 2006 Champ Car season when Sebastien Bourdais secured the third of his four titles. Excluding Champ Car, this feat had not been pulled off since 2001 when Sam Hornish Jr. won the first of his three titles.

Prior to 2001, it hadn’t been done since the inaugural season of the Indy Racing League, when Buzz Calkins was a co-champion with Scott Sharp. Calkins led the standings after each race, but there were only three races. Prior to that, it hadn’t been done since Johnny Rutherford pulled it off in the 1980 CART season.

Juan Pablo Montoya almost pulled it off in 2015, but Dixon won the title on a wins tiebreaker following the season finale. Montoya led the standings after each of the 16-race season’s first 15 races.

Newgarden almost pulled it off last year as well, as the only time he trailed anybody in the standings was after teammate Simon Pagenaud won the double points-paying Indy 500.

Pagenaud led Newgarden by just one point at the time, and they technically entered the next race tied atop the standings, as Newgarden secured a bonus points for a front row start at the Raceway on Belle Isle.

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Dixon pulled this off despite the fact that the 2020 championship marked the 15th consecutive title fight that came down to the season finale, and it came down to the finale despite the fact that the finale was not a double points race like it had been in each of the last six seasons.

IndyCar: Scott Dixon’s championship sits in rarified air

By Asher Fair | Oct 27, 2020

Scott Dixon led the championship standings after every single race on the 2020 IndyCar schedule, an extraordinarily rare feat.