INDIANAPOLIS — Scott Dixon finally got over the hump on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course in July. He won by 20 seconds that day. Prior to his victory, Dixon was runner up for three straight years. He watched a Penske car beat him each time.

Now, he’s looking for an a Indy road course sweep. He finished second in the Indy 500 after leading 111 laps. He has six top three finishes, five of which being in the top two, in his last eight starts at Indy overall.

With how this season is going for him, I expected Dixon to keep it conservative this weekend. He holds a wide lead in the standings and just needs to maintain. No need to swing for the fences like his championship rivals have to. Instead, he said he will still treat Indy like a normal race weekend and try to score maximum points to clinch the title without having to worry about St. Pete. 

“We just have to treat it like any other race weekend and try to get maximum points,” Dixon said. “The obvious goal is to go out there and try to win, but unfortunately there’s 23, 24 others that have the same goal. Try to do better than we did at the last doubleheader at Mid-Ohio where I definitely made a very large mistake, that gave away some pretty easy points there.”

There’s only three races left in the season and two of them are here. The finale is in St. Pete to where Dixon was runner up to Josef Newgarden last year. He has two podiums in his three starts on the Florida Street circuit at that. Newgarden’s win last year was his first podium there in eight tries. Simon Pagenaud has two podiums, both in 2016 and 2017, in eight tries at St. Pete. Pato O’Ward is a rookie while Takuma Sato and Graham Rahal have two combined podiums there, both by Rahal. Sato, has three finishes of 12th or worse in his last five St. Pete starts. While he has four top 10s at Indy, none have been better than ninth. Rahal has two runner ups, including his second place run on July 4 at Indy, but those are his only podiums here.

That’s why Dixon is sitting pretty. These drivers all have to take all the risks.

His teammates are ones to watch too. Felix Rosenqvist started on the pole and finished eighth last year. He was only 15th back in July though. Marcus Ericsson was also sixth on July 4 and should compete for a podium I think.

I can see Ganassi playing it safe with Dixon but allowing the other two to mix it up. In turn, with qualifying being so important now in the series, does Dixon’s two other teammates help in Thursday’s only practice session of the weekend to help land their championship contending teammate land a good baseline setup?

“Yeah, it depends,” Dixon said on if he will lean on his teammates for lending some setup help this weekend. “At least from our program, Felix and I have started to work out, if the 9 does this, the 10 will probably do that. You start to get a bit of a program together. With Marcus, it’s still a little bit unknown, especially because of how the season has been. We really haven’t had that much testing. Even race weekends, just such a limited amount of running that most of the cars start the same, then you don’t veer off too much.

“I think we work really well as a team. I think we’ve got a better understanding of what directions we need to be. Again, this is a little more unique, too, because we’ve already raced here this season. I think a lot of the time the biggest change for us is going to be ambient conditions but also tires. Each year the tires change a lot. At least for us, that’s what you chase the most. Then obviously with the Aeroscreen, that’s been one of the biggest changes, but we’ve already run it here.

“Yeah, still limited practice. I think it’s more about making sure you get on with your own program as quick as possible, then understand what you need to do for qualifying, make sure you get those laps together as best as possible.”