Scott Dixon, the Iceman, boils to win inside
Picture a chubby 14-year-old Scott Dixon sitting in his New Zealand Formula Vee car predicting the future.
“Go into (Formula) Ford and get graded for my license, hopefully I can, then go to Atlantic,” the young Dixon said of moving up the racing ranks. “Then hopefully Indy cars or something.”
He was grinning ear to ear in the YouTube video. It was as if he saw everything coming over the next 20-some years.
MORE:
Insider: 232 mph? Scott Dixon thought his dashboard was broken
The Borg-Warner Trophy is 'like my best friend'
Dixon has done nearly nothing but win — fourth all-time in wins, fourth in runner-up finishes, fifth in podiums, sixth in top fives — and he’s still pushing that car. He’s still pushing himself, because each loss nags at his mind.
Dixon is known for having no emotions. They call him the Iceman. But the woman who knows him best disagrees.
“I think that’s actually his winning secret,” Emma Davies-Dixon said Sunday after her husband won the pole for the Indianapolis 500. “He’s very emotional.”
No, Dixon never shows that emotion, but maybe it’s because this level of success is what he demands of himself.
This is what he expects.
Everyone may not see it, but those close to him say he wants to win more than anyone else.
It’s the first thing his teammates say about him.
“Scott, in particular, is probably the most competitive or fastest driver I've had as a teammate in my 15 years of career,” Max Chilton said.
“The only person he really cares about what they think are the three ladies he goes home to because, other than winning, that's probably what matters most to him,” Charlie Kimball said of Emma Davies-Dixon and Dixon's daughters, Poppy and Tilly.
Dixon enters the week as the pole sitter for the 101st Indianapolis 500, putting him in good position to win that second 500 he’s been saying he wants so badly. When a reporter asked Tony Kanaan about Dixon’s legacy and listed those rankings on the all-time lists, Kanaan said only one of them mattered.
“All he cares about is winning,” Tony Kanaan said. “He doesn't care about any of the numbers that you mentioned. I don't think he cares if he's as popular as me or not. He's here for pure racing.”
Where does that come from? There’s something inside somebody that pushes them to be as great as Dixon.
MORE:
IndyCar drivers Dixon, Franchitti robbed Sunday at west-side Taco Bell
With Dixon, that something is his own expectations.
He said it himself in his trailer last week while trying to figure out why he might care about winning more than most, a claim he neither confirms nor denies. He said everybody in IndyCar comes from different backgrounds and walks of life. Dixon, the winningest active driver, comes from New Zealand.
In New Zealand, Dixon said, people are expected to do things themselves. People there wouldn’t even think of hiring someone to mow their lawns. When the garage breaks, a Kiwi is out there himself with wood and nails fixing it.
“You figure out how to get on with the problem and just solve it, as opposed to always just getting somebody else to do it,” Dixon said.
This isn’t just Dixon as anecdotal evidence for all of New Zealand. Social psychologist Geert Hofstede did a study on the values of each nation. New Zealand’s most extreme value was individualism. People are expected to be self-reliant and not need others.
That’s where Dixon’s desire comes from. If he knows he is capable of doing something, he expects to do it. He isn’t as bothered when he and the team do everything they can and don’t pull out the win. It’s when everything is running right, when he has a chance to win and he fails, that makes his blood boil.
MORE:
So what’s the difference between IndyCar and Formula One?
IMS president’s race to save his son: ‘It was all scary’
“Those are the circumstances that keep you up at night,” Dixon said. “You replay it a lot. You think of many ways you should have done it differently.”
But even when he wins, he isn’t jumping around making a scene. He’s still relatively even-keeled.
People say he wants to win more than anybody else, but he doesn’t show much emotion when it happens. So what does he even get out of winning?
“I think it’s expected,” he said. “I think it’s expected of us to do that.”
And with each win, he said, he expects it just a little more. It never subsides, Davies-Dixon said. Because the Kiwi in him tells him that when he knows he can do something, he is expected to keep doing it. He keeps searching for ways to improve, ways to hone his edge.
Davies-Dixon, a former British 800-meter champ, said she thinks her husband is an even better athlete now than when they met more than a decade ago. She takes some of the credit — she’s helped him train the past few years.
Longtime friend and teammate Dario Franchitti said in a January interview with NBC Sports that when he spoke to Dixon on the phone, Dixon was dropping his daughters off at school and going straight to the gym.
“I really think his best years are ahead of him,” Davies-Dixon said.
* * *
Dixon gets uneasy trying to explain why they call him the Iceman.
He said maybe it’s because he’s monotone. That’s not it. Maybe it’s because he has thick skin. Not quite. He said he isn’t super emotional. Bingo.
Kanaan had just walked in the room when he heard this.
“Zero,” Kanaan said, making the shape with his hand.
For example, Dixon and Franchitti were robbed outside of a Taco Bell restaurant at gunpoint Sunday night, hours after Dixon won the Indy 500 pole. Dixon reportedly had a gun pointed directly at his head, and when he talked to Kanaan about it, he wasn’t particularly rattled.
“Nothing really affects the guy,” he said. “He was telling the story like, ‘Oh, it’s all right.'”
But as Davies-Dixon said, it's not apathy. He just knows how to control those emotions.
She agrees that, at his core, he has an inability to accept second place and needs to win badly. She agrees New Zealanders like him just want to prove they're mighty. But that’s only for sports, she said. When he’s outside of racing, that isn’t the case.
Like when Dixon won the pole on Sunday, he was the last to the media center podium. On either side of him were his daughters. Poppy to his left, Tilly on the right.
They were joking about wanting ice cream now that Dad won the pole, and Dixon was tickling Tilly when she broke out a massive grin.
When Dixon was trying to explain what winning does for him and why he doesn’t go crazy when he wins, he said he enjoys it in his own way. He said, in those moments, he’s just happy for his family.
So what does Scott Dixon get out of the winning he craves so much?
He gets his daughters celebrating by his side, with Emma sitting across the podium blowing kisses and mouthing, “I love you.”