Dixon’s Ganassi team ready to take more risks

Chris Simmons, Scott Dixon’s race engineer since the start of 2015, says that the reigning champion’s 83-point deficit to Team Penske’s Simon Pagenaud, means the team is ready to take more gambles over the remaining five rounds of the championship.

“Even if we can’t win the championship, we want to finish second,” Simmons told Motorsport.com, “if we can’t finish first or second, we want to finish third. That’s the way we operate and we’re all onboard with that.

“We always evaluate the positives and negatives of any strategy and now the downsides are becoming less important and the upsides more important, so you could see some more aggressive and bold strategies from us, yes.”

Although he scored his first IndyCar title back in 2003, and his fourth and most recent one just last year, Dixon’s most remarkable statistic is his current nine-year streak of finishing in the top three in the championship.

However, he currently lies fourth in the points table – not helped by an engine failure while running second at Road America and an unlucky yellow while leading in Toronto.

“Toronto was not good, but we still finished in front of Pagenaud,” observed Simmons, “so we did close a little bit to the front of the pack. Not as much as we would have liked but it wasn’t a complete disaster.

“You know, when you’re racing against Penske with four good cars, it’s hard to cover all their strategies! And championship-wise, we’re up against three of them – the #22 [Pagenaud], #12 [Will Power] and the #3 [Helio Castroneves]. So now it’s a case of getting our heads down and trying to get as many points as we can and getting as many wins as we can.”

Simmons, who guided Dario Franchitti to the 2009 and ’10 titles, before switching from the #10 to the #9 CGR entry for 2015, insisted: “The championship is attainable. Last year, even going into Sonoma [the season finale] we weren’t sure we could do it. We figured we needed some help. But we did it.

“So at this point, we still feel [the 2016 title] is in our hands. It’s still in reach, and we’re coming up to tracks that have been pretty good to Chip Ganassi Racing in the past.”

Despite Dixon being renowned as one of the best drivers at fuel-saving, Simmons said that the Toronto race had been an example of needing to react to any of the other front runners pitting, so that should a full-course caution fall at an inopportune moment, the leader’s loss in track position compared with his rivals would be minimized. In Toronto, Dixon and Pagenaud had planned to make their final stops the lap after Power, but the yellows flew while Power was making his way down pitlane and so he cycled to the front of the pack, and his two rivals had to come from mid-pack.

Said Simmons: “Scott’s awesome at fuel saving at Mid-Ohio and Sonoma; the speeds he can run while still saving fuel are a huge benefit to us and I’m sure that’ll come into play.

“But on tracks where we see a lot of yellows, you can’t leave yourselves vulnerable by maximizing your fuel, if one of your rivals pits before you. In Toronto, we thought there was a reason to stay out and it bit us but we’re cognizant of the risk/reward."

This weekend’s Mid-Ohio race is one that Ganassi has won seven times in the last nine years, five of those seven being earned by Dixon. Dixon has also won at all the other tracks left on the 2016 schedule – three times at Watkins Glen and Sonoma, twice at Texas Motor Speedway and once at Pocono Raceway.