IndyCar: Will anybody ever repeat Dan Wheldon’s historic feat?

It has been 16 years since an IndyCar championship was already decided heading into a season finale. Will anybody ever secure a title before a finale again?

Last season, Chip Ganassi Racing’s Scott Dixon, who is historically known more for his strong finishes to IndyCar seasons than strong starts, reeled off three straight wins to open up the year.

Unsurprisingly, he went on to secure his sixth career championship, and he became the first driver to lead the standings after every single race on the schedule since Sam Hornish Jr. won the 2001 opener and never gave up the points lead.

However, despite the huge lead Dixon opened up in the standings in the early stages of the season, there was one thing that he failed to do, something that still hasn’t been done in more than a decade and a half.

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Following his fourth win of the season in the season’s eighth race at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, Dixon had a 117-point lead in the standings over Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden. Newgarden had won just one race at that point.

To put that in perspective, race wins pay 50 points, plus one point for leading at least one lap (so guaranteed at least 51), one point for taking the pole position and two points for leading the most laps. So at most, 54. In a 25-car field, the last place finisher scores five points, making the maximum difference 49 points.

So with six races to go on the schedule, Dixon was effectively two and a half worst-case scenario races ahead of Newgarden.

Yet he still couldn’t match what the late Dan Wheldon did en route to winning the 2005 championship.

Newgarden was able to claw his way back, winning three of the final six races, and he ended up taking 101 points out of that 117-point chunk before settling for his first runner-up finish in the standings.

He beat Dixon in each of the season’s final six races. But most importantly, he ensured that the championship was decided in the season finale and not sooner.

IndyCar doesn’t use any form of a playoff system like NASCAR does, and yet every one of the last 15 championship battles has come down to the wire. The last driver to secure the title prior to the season finale was Wheldon in 2005.

Of course, IndyCar has used double points for season finales, doing so from 2014 to 2019. But even without double points on offer in those races, there would have been at least two drivers mathematically eligible to win the title entering them.

More impressively, not only did Wheldon have the title solidified prior to the 2005 season finale; he had it solidified with two races to go, as long as he showed up to race in at least one of those two events.

So even if somebody does manage to clinch the title in the season’s penultimate race, the odds of someone doing so to truly match Wheldon’s mark are infinitesimally small, especially this season with how tight the field is.

Will the 2021 season see the first championship decided before the finale since 2005? The 17-race season is scheduled to get underway this afternoon at Barber Motorsports Park with the Honda Indy Grand Prix of Alabama presented by AmFirst, which is set to be broadcast live on NBC beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET.