Dixon puzzled by faulty air jacks

There are some things in racing that just don’t fail, and when they do, it’s when you least expect them to. One of those times happened to Scott Dixon today at the Firestone Indy Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.

A disappointing day

Air jacks are normally extremely reliable, however as any system on a race car tends to do, it runs into problems. For Dixon today, the air jacks failing affected his race quite severely as he was only able to manage a 15th place finish.

You know you can’t really recover from that, especially with the competition that’s out there

Scott Dixon

“I think early on we tried to see if we could rectify the problem but it was just too difficult and frustrating to go to the back of the field every time you pit. You know you can’t really recover from that, especially with the competition that’s out there, it’s just too tough,” Dixon said.

Even though Ganassi is one of the most prepared teams in the series, they were not well prepared for air jacks failing. Would pit crew practice involving manual jacks solve that?

“It still wouldn’t help. You know the efficiency is just way off, you know you’re adding five to ten seconds to each stop, which you know enables the whole field to go by. It is what it is,” Dixon said.

And of course, when it goes right, it’s too late to affect the outcome.

A rare problem

“Actually at the end there when I got out of the car it started working again, so they’re trying to figure out what’s going on,” Dixon said.

It had been a long time since Dixon had an issue like this.

“We were just thinking about it, it’s been several years since we’ve had that problem, actually I think the last time for me was at Sonoma like four years ago, so it’s not something that typically fails but obviously it’s something we’ll look into,” Dixon said.