After a brief vacation to recharge his batteries, Scott Dixon, the IndyCar Series point leader and 2008 Indy 500 winner, is ready to head for the Iowa Speedway for race eight on the IndyCar Series schedule.

Dixon and wife Emma spent part of his rare off time vacationing in the Turcs and Caicos Islands, before returning to the states and changing the focus to the 0.8 mile Iowa Speedway. In last year's inaugural Iowa Corn Indy 250, Dixon came home just 10th, after spending numerous laps in the pits with a steering/suspension issue.

Coming in to the 2008 event Dixon appears ready to greatly improve on that sub par result. The New Zealander has just a single result outside of the top three and that came in the Series second event at St. Petersburg where he finished 22nd.

In the six other races he has run, Dixon has three wins, a second and two third place results. This has combined to give him a 35 point lead over Helio Castroneves and a 67 point advantage over teammate Dan Wheldon.

For this weekend's race, Dixon will head for the Iowa Speedway with a new paint scheme as his normally red and white car will sport the blue and white colors of “Commit” a stop smoking product that will move from associate to primary sponsor for this event.

Hopefully for Dixon, the change of paint will not cause a change of luck as it did for his teammate recently at Texas. There, Dan Wheldon crashed his special black and white painted machine during practice forcing him to a back-up car for the race.

The car Dixon is using at Iowa is actually the same Dallara chassis he drove to victory in this year?s event on the 1.5mile oval at Homestead, while also visiting victory lane twice in 2007 on the road courses at Watkins Glen and Mid-Ohio.

Practice for the Iowa race officially gets underway on Saturday morning, though Dixon and the rest of the IndyCar Series teams have been granted a special “open test” session on Friday afternoon.

Mainly for the benefit of the teams transitioning to the IndyCar Series from the ChampCar World Series, this test is expected to get full participation as the IRL has mandated a slightly different wing package and Firestone is bringing in a different tire configuration for this year's event.

©CAPSIS International