Scott Dixon wins in Guitar Town; IndyCar Championship Chase Heats Up - Skillfully, and in the eyes of more than a few present, a bit too bravely, Scott Dixon raced his Target Chip Ganassi Racing Honda/Dallara past Dario Franchitti’s Andretti Green Racing Honda/Dallara and Dan Wheldon’s Ganassi Honda/Dallara on the 89th lap of the 200-lap Firestone 200 at Nashville Superspeedway to win his second IRL IndyCar race in two weeks. And not only was the win Dixon’s sixth podium finish in 11 races this season, it lopped 13 points off championship leader Dario Franchitti’s point lead.

”What I saw was a mess,” Dixon told Speed TV of his daring pass that came in the third turn of the 89th lap. “Going through Turns 1 and 2, everybody just got bottled up with lapped traffic. I had a good run and backed off a bit. I anticipated and saw it coming, but I didn’t think they’d slow down that much, to be honest. I thought maybe I’d get one of them, but not both. It so happened that they split one person and I went inside both of them.”

After the race, Franchitti, for one, thought the move a bit too risky for his liking.

”That’s one of those points where you have to make a decision,” Franchitti said. “Had I not been in the fight for the championship, I probably would have stuck the thing in the marbles and tried to see if I could make the big outside pass, but I’d would have looked pretty stupid with the car sitting in a smoking heap on the exit of Turn 2.”

With just six races to go in the 2007 IndyCar schedule, Franchitti — the 2007 Indianapolis 500 winner — holds a 34-point lead.

”I like being in this position,” Dixon said. “We’ve got nothing to lose now. We can just go as hard as we can and just go for race wins. That’s what we struggled with in the first part of the season; we were maybe too reserved and came up with a run of second-place finishes. That hurt us. Now we’ve just got to go all out and get as many wins as possible.”

Danica Patrick placed an impressive third-overall at Nashville, followed home by Sam Hornish Jr. held on to fourth, very much alive in the 200 title chase. Marco Andretti placed fifth, followed by Scott Sharp, Dan Wheldon, Darren Manning and Vitor Meira.