Fuel-Saving Maestro Scott Dixon Can’t Save Enough To Beat Alex Palou

ELKHART LAKE, Wis. — Scott Dixon knows he doesn’t have a shot at a seventh INDYCAR title this year.

So going for race victory No. 59 is the strategy every week. Even if it means a roll of the dice.

Putting Dixon in a position to save fuel to potentially win a race doesn’t always equate to a roll of the dice. But Sunday, at Road America, to try to go the final 18 laps on fuel was just a little bit too much at a 4.014-mile track where the fuel run was approximately 13 to 15 laps.

Dixon had to pit with two laps remaining, relinquishing the lead to Alex Palou, who won for the sixth time in nine races this year. 

Now 155 points behind Palou, Dixon expects the strategy to focus on victory lane even more than usual.

“We have nothing to lose,” Dixon said. “We’re just going for some race wins. You’re pretty much out of the championship. Nothing to lose. Throw some Hail Marys.”

Palou has seen Dixon throw some Hail Marys and make them work. 

So he, at first, was frustrated and confused. He wouldn’t be able to beat Dixon straight up because Dixon had on the softer tires and would have been able to hold him off if the caution came out and they had a restart.

“When I was following Scott, I could see that he was not saving as much as I was,” Palou said. “I was like, ‘This guy is crazy. How is he going to do it?’ But I didn’t know. I don’t have a lot of information.

“If it was another driver, I would have probably just focused on myself. But I know that Scott can make crazy stuff happen.”

Palou’s strategist, Barry Wanser, had his engineers triple check their numbers to make sure that Dixon couldn’t make it on fuel, as they continued to tell Palou to save over the final 10 laps.

“I’m like, ‘Are we missing something here? Because Dixon is running numbers — lap times. He’s not going to be able to get it based on the number we gave him,’” Wanser said.

“They double-checked everything, triple-checked. But we were pretty confident we were going to be fine.”

Once Dixon had to pit, Palou’s biggest concern turned to Felix Rosenqvist, who had fresher tires. But Rosenqvist couldn’t catch Palou and settled for second, with Santino Ferrucci third, Kyle Kirkwood fourth and Marcus Armstrong fifth.

Kirkwood, the only driver other than Palou to win this year, moved to second in the standings, 93 points behind Palou.

While it seems everything has worked this year for Palou, it has not for his teammate Dixon, who had to start in Row 13 after a penalty during qualifying for impeding Devlin DeFrancesco.

So even with the fast car, he had to try an alternative strategy.

“It’s been one of those years, man. Anything we do is just kind of crappy,” Dixon said. “We’ll keep at it, keep knocking on the door. The car has got good speed and hopefully we’ll get some winning ways going.”

It does appear that Dixon’s ability to save fuel has been neutralized by the hybrid, which adds about 100 pounds of rear weight. 

Dixon feels he would have made it without the hybrid, which was introduced during last season (of course, that potentially would have altered the strategy of others).

“Fuel mileage is way worse with the hybrid, which makes no sense of why we even have it,” Dixon said. “It’s the same for everybody. Everybody’s got to carry this lump of weight around.”

And many were hoping for that late caution that never came. Palou could have used it, too, to be more on the attack rather than saving fuel himself. Just not needing to save as much as Dixon.

“You’re throwing some pretty wild strategies there just to try and make something happen, but it looked like [ours was] actually the conservative one. The one a lot of the others took was just the right one to take,” Dixon said.

“We had to bank on at least another lap or two [of caution]. The unfortunate part is the car was super fast. Like even with all our speed today, we were just having to save fuel every lap. So it was kind of frustrating.”

If he is rolling the dice, why not just stay on track and let it run out of fuel and see if a miracle could happen?

“You’ve got pretty good senses,” Dixon said. “You know whether you’re going to make it or not. You don’t want to be that person hanging out on the track for a lap or two.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.