Scott Dixon’s Sonoma IndyCar win vaults him to 2015 drivers championship

SONOMA – They ran 2,232 laps on the IndyCar circuit this year. After 2,231, the Verizon series championship was still up for grabs.

The GoPro Grand Prix of Sonoma has sometimes been criticized as boring due to its lack of passing, but with the IndyCar points championship hinging on this year’s event, there was intrigue until the final seconds.

In the end, Scott Dixon won Sunday’s 85-lap race and stole the season title from under Juan Pablo Montoya, who came into the weekend as the prohibitive favorite.

With Montoya finishing sixth, and with Dixon getting bonus points for leading the most laps Sunday, the two finished the year in a dead heat with 556 points. Dixon got it on a tiebreaker, having won three races to Montoya’s two.

“Still feels a bit strange,” said Dixon, who arrived in California with 453 points, 47 behind Montoya. “Obviously, it was a day where we needed a lot of things to go our way. For the first part, we had to win. … It was a bit of a long shot. Obviously, things had to maneuver into place.”

Amazingly, they did.

Will Power had won pole position for Sunday’s race, putting himself in great position to support Team Penske partner Montoya in his bid for the title, or perhaps to claim it himself. Instead, the two teammates ruined one another’s chances when Power made a sudden inside move on Lap 39 and Montoya clipped him from behind.

Both headed to the pits and neither would make a serious run at the checkered flag.

Montoya eventually worked his way through the pack as the afternoon progressed, and would have claimed the open-wheel championship in his first year back from NASCAR if he could have passed Ryan Briscoe for fifth place. The Colombian driver got to within a couple car lengths, but no closer than that.

Montoya was less than gracious afterward as he complained about a system that awarded double points for the season finale at Sonoma.

“Dixon had a (crap) season all year and had one good race, and we paid the penalty,” Montoya said, his young children at the back of the room.

What Montoya didn’t acknowledge was that he won the other double-points race of 2015, at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Remove both doubles, and Dixon still would be the champion.

Dixon, meanwhile, ran a nearly perfect race. He started ninth but picked off competitors right out of the chute and was running fifth after a couple laps. Dixon’s crew came through on his second pit stop, getting him back onto the road in six seconds, which allowed him to cut in front of Power and Josef Newgarden. When Ryan Hunter-Reay pitted after Lap 62, Dixon assumed the lead.

He was one of the few drivers to keep tire traction throughout the warm afternoon, and he proved uncatchable – on the track and in the point standings.

“The team wasn’t saying much, so I knew it was pretty tight (with Montoya),” Dixon said. “All we focused on was winning the race. That’s all we could do. … It was hard to know exactly where Juan was. I knew he was gonna be strong at the end of the race, he’s always a hard charger and one that is definitely gonna intimidate some people that are in front of him.

“So it wasn’t gonna be over until the last lap, and even when we finished, I asked the team, ‘We won the race, that’s fantastic. What about the championship?’ I think it wasn’t until maybe the carousel where they came back and said we won the championship.”

Hunter-Reay finished second, and Charlie Kimball third.

This comeback may be the crowning achievement for Dixon, the New Zealander, who won his fourth IndyCar championship.

It was also a banner day for Chip Ganassi Racing, which was awarded the IndyCar team title. Ganassi, the portly 57-year-old team owner, was so excited that he crowd surfed in the Winner’s Circle afterward.

Six drivers came into the race with at least a mathematical chance to win the title: Montoya, Graham Rahal, Dixon, Power, Helio Castroneves and Newgarden. Five of them ran into trouble on the road course.

Besides the Montoya-Power disaster, Castroneves had to pit on Lap 3 to get a new front wing and struggled to regain his position all day. Newgarden pitted with a starter problem after Lap 60, briefly felt flames come from the rear of the car and then had trouble restarting. Rahal was spun out by Sebastian Bourdais with just a few laps remaining.

“Bourdais unfortunately in recent times has made a lot of moves like that,” Rahal said. “I don’t know what kind of excuse he could possibly come up with, with hitting me in the rear, but I hit the brakes at the 200(-foot) mark. It was going to be impossible for him to stop had he gone inside of me. And even if he had gone outside, he wasn’t going anywhere, yet he clearly just wasn’t even looking.”

The one guy who emerged unscathed was Dixon, who successfully defended his crown at Sonoma.

If the championship reversal was the news of the day, the backdrop was the death of Justin Wilson.

Wilson died last Monday, the day after a piece of Sage Karam’s car flew off in a crash at Pocono Raceway and struck the 37-year-old British driver in the helmet. Wilson was exceptionally popular among IndyCar drivers, and Sunday was the first opportunity the series had to honor him.

The Union Jack flew from a camera tower in front of the grandstand, sky-writing pilots painted “25” – the number on Wilson’s car – in the Carneros sky, and the prerace ceremony included a video tribute, a moment of silence and a rendition of “God Save the Queen.”

Veteran driver Oriol Servia piloted the No. 25 car, by request of Wilson’s family.

“A really close friend of Justin Wilson came over to me after the race and said, ‘Justin would have been really proud of what you guys did today,’ ” Ganassi Racing managing director Mike Hull said.

In truth, the team had a lot to be proud of.

You can reach Staff Writer Phil Barber at 521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com.