Focus For The Win: Scott Dixon

How Being Mindful About The Slow Moments Helps The Five-Time IndyCar Champion Go Fast

Mindalt

Published in

The Lark

10 min readAug 10, 2021

Scott at Indianapolis motor Speedway. Photo by Scott Owens.

Update October 25, 2020: On October 25, 2020 Dixon won his staggering 6th IndyCar championship title, making him second on the all time list only to the legendary A. J. Foyt .

You could say Scott Dixon started 2020 with a big win… both on and off the tracks.

The new year marked the racing champ’s 19th season with Chip Ganassi Racing (CGR) –the longest tenure for a driver in team history. He kicked off the new season on January 26th by claiming his fourth Rolex 24 Hours Victory with Wayne Taylor Racing. That same month, the 39-year-old Dixon experienced a profoundly different kind of photo finish: his very first family portrait with newborn son, Kit, in tow.

As a kid in New Zealand, Dixon never could have imagined the storybook ride that would take him from South Auckland to racing in one of the pinnacles of motorsport, the Indy 500. Or could he? His relentless ability to keep his vision on the win has helped him take home five IndyCar championships since 2003 and clutch the Indianapolis 500 trophy in 2006.

Dixon and his wife, Emma, are proud parents to two daughters Poppy and Tilly and newborn Kit. Photo by Rachel Vanoven.

Today, at 39, Dixon is ranked third on the all-time IndyCar win list (just behind Mario Andretti and AJ Foyt.) While he feels incredibly fortunate, he also believes that success comes down to “effort equals results.”

Fatherhood has sharpened that laser-focus. Rather than slowing him down, taking the time to experience the joys and thrills of off-track life has been key to accelerating his performance on the track.

Be it an unrushed Sunday morning with family or even just living in the moment with a beloved cup of morning coffee, the race pro has mastered the art of being intentional about the slow moments to avoid burnout altogether.

Morning Diary

Dixon gives us full access to his morning routine, an exclusive look at his training regimen, life on the road, how he mentally prepares for a race, how fatherhood has transformed his outlook on his career and how he spends his alone time.

Scott at Indianapolis motor Speedway. Photo by Scott Owens.

Life philosophy: It comes down to “results equal effort.” The results speak for themselves. For me, effort is never in one area, especially with so many different disciplines — the short track, ovals, superspeedways, road course, and street course. You can’t be good at one thing. It’s being good at many things. So, short answer, I would love to be known as a great dad, a great family person, a great husband, and being a champion.”

Morning firsts: Coffee and a moment of calm. My morning starts at 6 or 7 am. My routine is having a coffee. I enjoy quiet time to reflect or catch up on the news. Then I try to have breakfast with the kids before taking them to school on a typical day.

Obviously, weekends the mornings are a lot more relaxed. But during the week, the mornings are a serious function of our day because it’s setting a tone. When you’re a parent, mornings are important because your process impacts the rest of the day.

There’s no doubt some days are better than others. Whether you’ve had a good sleep or you’ve got a million different things going on in your mind. For me, I really enjoy drinking that coffee. I have one a day, sometimes 2. On the rare days I’m not able to sit down and go through that pot and properly start the day, I’m a little moody.

Scott having breakfast with kids. Photo courtesy of Emma and Scott Dixon.

“I think all of us are very much creatures of habit; routine is something that most of us love. Being in a very disciplined sport, I think you need those rituals.”

Morning routine: My mornings represent getting ready for battle. Yes, there’s always the great things in life, enjoying the coffee or the sun coming up, but for me, it quickly changes into what I’m going to get out of that day and the next day. It’s about the effort I plan to put into an upcoming race and the results I expect to see. I always felt that your results are directly related to the discipline you put in ahead of time, whether that’s the racetrack or any form of sport or business. It’s about preparation and discipline.

Extreme training: When I first started in IndyCar, we did almost 60 days of testing every season. Today that’s been cut down to about three days due to changing regulations and other factors. So you have to hit the ground running. You really can’t replicate what you’re doing in a car, which adds to the challenges. I train for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon at PitFit. The facility focuses on extreme fitness, neurocognitive, and postural programs for motorsport athletes. And it’s not just physical training. We have reaction tests like threshold updates, and factoring in math equations with light reaction, so you’re flooding the mind.

Dixon at PitFit training the neck muscles. Photograph courtesy of PitFit

The workout to mood relationship: I do the bulk of my training in the morning. Once I get through that, I’m mentally okay for the rest of the day because I did that workout. I really crushed it.

If I’m in a bad mood, if I hadn’t slept well, whatever it is, I feel a hundred times better after I’ve worked out no matter what the situation is. It just changes my day.

Lists, lists, lists: Preparation is a mix of many things, but I’m also a person that loves to have lists, whether it’s racing or a honey-do list from Emma for stuff around the house. I get a major kick out of getting through my lists.

Biggest change: Definitely having kids. Mentally, that helped me a lot. It used to be very easy to go down a rabbit hole and get so sucked into race performance that it becomes an intense cycle you can’t break. Having kids changed that. Coming home after a bad race to spend time with my two daughters — Poppy and Tilly — whether playing with horses or Barbie dolls, broke me out of the process of thinking only about what went wrong.

Photo courtesy of Emma and Scott Dixon

“I think a lot of my results are reflected in a great change, and fatherhood is when I had that personal breakaway from being totally consumed by racing.”

Changing stigmas: There’s always that stigma, especially in motor racing like, “Hey, you have kids. It’s going to make you slower because you’re thinking about your family more.” But like I said, having children changed my thought process. Honestly, is it going to help to debrief the race 20 times as opposed to just 5? Sometimes it’s better to think fresh than be tainted.

The quarantine effect: It’s been a time for physical and mental reset. Quarantine has emphasized what the human body needs, and mentally what we need. Seeing this through the kids’ eyes has opened that up and simplified it too. We’re able to talk about things on a totally different level.

Scott, Poppy and Tilly start the weekend with a little at home spa time during coronavirus quarantine.Photo courtesy of Emma and Scott Dixon

Race week stress: It’s so much mental processing. You can pool 200 to 300 channels of information off of the car. You’re not just competing with in-house teammates. There are 25 competitors outside your team, so you need to process all of their data too. You ghost the video of every car that runs on the track to figure out how different drivers will break. It’s mentally straining these days to process the amount of information because you know everybody is trying to process it quicker. A good driver can replicate these situations and develop a strategy to pick up in that one corner where a driver has an advantage.

Best race day prep: For me, a perfect day is having a 20 or 30-minute nap right before driver intros. I’ve always had nerves, so it’s that quiet time I need. Sometimes when it’s at a loud track, I’ll listen to some soothing beach sounds or water sounds to allow me to sleep.

Funny story. I nearly missed my first ever qualifying event for a Chip Ganassi race. I had fallen asleep getting ready for qualifying. Nobody knew where I was. Luckily, I woke up. There were three counts to go before we ran and qualified fourth.

Scott napping in the “hauler” pre-race. Photo courtesy of Dario Franchitti

Put on the helmet, shut out the world: Once I put on my helmet, nobody can get to me. It’s just where you feel most comfortable. You get strapped into the car. It’s the years of the routine of putting my right glove on before I put my left one on. I get into the car from the left side. It’s the process that I’ve done since I was racing go-karts at the age of seven. Those are the triggers that don’t get altered. It helps me with my process.

Photo by Chris Owen, INDYCAR

Race mode: You kind of flip. You get into the car. It goes quiet. You do radio checks. Your mind goes into overload as a competitor. There are a lot of emotions that go on before the race.

You’re constantly thinking of a strategy. What’s different about IndyCar racing is that one second you can be dominating a race, and then a caution can flip it. You’ll be way back, maybe 14th or 15th, and you have to figure out a way back to the front. Those situations can be very frustrating.

Self-improvement tool: I think failure is good. Any success I’ve had is because of failure. It’s a driving point. When I lose or do something wrong or let someone down, it equates to a reset. If you take too many things for granted, it’s a good way to knock yourself down and understand how difficult things can be. I’ve always turned failure into a good thing.

Best mindfulness tool: It’s a lot of visualization. Seeing the checkered flag first. Seeing the celebration. It sets you in the right mood. It’s going in knowing you can do it vs. going in saying it’s going to be a horrible day. It’s about staying positive. One time we screwed up in qualifying and got red-flagged. We started 24th in the grid but we didn’t focus on that. We still knew we had a chance if the strategy went haywire and it did. We went from 24th to win it. That’s a big thing for Chip (Ganassi) too. His last sentence in meetings is always “do the obvious things right.” In our line of work and others, as long as you do the obvious things right, it pays dividends.

Community cares: St. Jude has always been a big part of our team. I try to support cancer patients in their teens; it is already such a confusing time with a lot of unknowns. There’s pediatric cancer care, then there’s general cancer care, but there’s nothing in the middle that hones in on what they’re going through. I learned that many of those teens just want to talk. They want to hang out with other kids their age. We also raise money for the Humane Society in Indianapolis.

Scott and Emma chairing the Mutt Strutt in Indianapolis in 2019. Photo courtesy of Emma and Scott Dixon

Need more of now: Right now, it’s simplicity. More time for yourself, for family, for friends. I think simplicity allows you to get back to things that mean the most to you. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, you end up doing things simply because it’s a requirement. It’s not something you’re doing for work or because work opened up an opportunity. These days it’s easy to run flat out. Especially in America, you see a lot of people work very long hours, which may not always be extremely productive.