Scott Dixon Won By A Lot

As you may have noticed, I don't write much about my beloved IndyCar Series on Skip To My Lank. Nobody I know really knows anything about the series, nor do they much care. Big Brother, God bless his soul, watches races from time to time and asks me questions about the Series, but 87% of that effort is just to humor me, I think. Willie P used to watch IndyCars like it was his job, but since The Split, his heart just isn't in it any more.

But tonight, I'm writing about the IndyCar Series, because my favorite driver, Scott Dixon, put on one heck of a show at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course today. And by "one heck of a show", I really mean there wasn't much of a show at all because Dixon won by a commercial. Commercial? I don't get it, you're saying.

Watch this...

Ok, finished? If Scott Dixon crossed the finish line at the beginning of the commercial, then his closest competitor would have finished at the very end of it. He won by 30 seconds. That's absurd. I've never seen anything like it in my life. Normally, guys get "huge" leads when they're up by 5 or 7 seconds. Dixon was up by 5 times that much. At the end. When guys are supposed to be going balls to the wall for the win.

He had the fastest car on the track (obviously), and once he passed Justin Wilson to take the lead on lap 37 (of 85) it was curtains for everybody else. The lap he put down before his last pit stop was the fastest of the race, showing everyone that he wasn't going to rest on his laurels and take the lead he'd already built up; he wanted more. It's that exact attitude that allowed him to win the 2008 championship and allows him to currently lead the points standings for the 2009 season as well.

Oh, and to cap off Dixon's perfect day, my roommate's girlfriend, while watching the post-race interview with me (yeah, she got a lot of roommate brownie points from me today), said, "wow, Scott Dixon is hot." When you're on a roll, you're on a roll, I guess.

Tune in to the rest of the races this season to see if his roll continues. I, for one, hope it does.

~~ Lank

NASCAR Hates Juan Pablo Montoya

Maybe it's because he's an outsider. Maybe it's because he's more aggressive than resident "bad boy" Kyle Busch. Maybe it's because drivers new to the sport aren't supposed to be this good this fast. Maybe it's because his English doesn't have a Southern drawl to it. Maybe it's because he's foreign. Maybe it's because he's an arrogant Formula One driver like Sacha Baron Cohen in "Talladega Nights".

Whatever the reason, NASCAR does not like Juan Pablo Montoya. The fans don't like him, some of the drivers don't (though they respect his prodigious talent), and the league suits really don't. I was on vacation in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana during the Brickyard 400 (don't even try to get me to call it the Allstate 400), and was listening on the radio on the way back from White Castle when Montoya, who was leading the race by 5.5 seconds -- no, really -- was called for a drive-thru penalty because he sped through pit lane during his last pit stop.

By .07 miles per hour.

That's right, supposedly he was going 60.06 in a 59.99 zone according to NASCAR's computers. Never mind that he had dominated the race, similar to his trip around the Brickyard when he won the Indianapolis 500 in 2000. Never mind that his warning light, which is designed to tell a driver when he's going too fast in the pits, never came on. Never mind that his crew claimed they got no reading that his car was going too fast.

NASCAR called him for speeding, and that was that.

The second it happened, I turned to Big Brother, who was riding shotgun and said, "that's bullcrap and you know it." He laughed, knowing that I'm an open-wheel fan who roots for Montoya to do well to show the arrogant Southerners that their cars aren't some mystery that open-wheel drivers are unable to solve. Let's just say that if you put Dale Earnhardt, Jr. in an IndyCar, he wouldn't be nearly as fast as Sam Hornish, Jr. in a stock car...relatively speaking, of course.

To make things worse, NASCAR did it again to Montoya in yesterday's race at Pocono. On the double-file restart, Kasey Kahne was "pushed from behind" in his words and ran Montoya right up the track, almost into the wall. Kahne himself said that Montoya was one of the only drivers in NASCAR who could've kept that car from crashing. The culprit for this "push"? Denny Hamlin, the eventual race winner, who blasted past David Reutimann earlier, causing Reutimann to spin and collect Marcos Ambrose in the process. When that happened, my dad sent me a text at work to say, "Hamlin is out of control; NASCAR needs to park him". Interesting, a guy is going .07 over the speed limit in the pits and you bring him in, yet you allow a madman to drive around the track pushing cars out of his way. Hamlin's push allowed him to slide underneath Kahne, Hornish, and Montoya, giving him a lead he wouldn't relinquish in the last ten or so laps.

Nice job, NASCAR.

The funny part of it all? Juan Pablo Montoya is still 8th in the Chase standings, with a road course coming up next, where he excels since he actually knows how to turn right, too. Basically, Montoya is a virtual lock for the Chase, and will be causing plenty of headaches for the front-runners for the final 10 races of the year that determine the championship.

Actually, forget that I said that. If NASCAR has their way, they'll sneak Kyle Busch into the Top 12 and leave Montoya standing on the sidelines. Is it possible to finish .07 points behind someone in the standings?

~~ Lank