Dixon takes 48 Point lead to Richmond/Team plans to race Indy 500 winner on short track.

You know a driver is having a good year when a fourth place finish is considered disappointing, but that is exactly the kind of season Scott Dixon is having. After being granted the pole position last week at Iowa Speedway when rain washed out qualifying and the field was set by points, Dixon slipped back during the race and for the first time since he suffered a mechanical failure at St. Petersburg, the “iceman” was not a factor to win a race.

But, by finishing fourth, Dixon did what a driver hoping to win the championship needed to do, and that was get the most points on a day when the car was not quite up to the task.

When the dust settled in Iowa, Dixon had actually increased his point lead over Helio Castroneves, his closest pursuer, to 48 markers. Unfortunately for Dixon, the race was won by teammate Dan Wheldon who is now third in the championship, and 49 points back.

Wheldon has not been as consistently fast as Dixon, but he has completed every lap run in 2008 (1,586) to remain in contact with the point leader. Yet, it is Dixon that heads to Richmond with nearly a full race lead in the points.

The Indy Racing League point system pays 50 points to the winner of a race, with three bonus points available for leading the most laps. Starting an event guarantees a driver at least 10 points (though a driver gets just half that if they crash in practice and don?t run the event).

As the team prepares to race at Richmond International Raceway this weekend, Dixon and company are certainly not relaxing, even though they could probably afford to so.

In fact, Ganassi Racing has chosen to run their 2008 Indianapolis 500 winning car on the IndyCar Series shortest race track. Unhappy with how his car handled at Iowa, the team is making a pretty drastic move considering most IndyCar Series teams have just three chassis per driver in their inventory, and normally designate one of them for short track/road course duty. The average IndyCar Series team would save their most aerodynamically refined chassis for the series biggest and fastest tracks, but apparently Ganassi Racing is comfortable taking the car that won at both Indy and Texas to the 0.75mile bullring near America's eastern seaboard.

It remains to be seen if that will be a good gamble, but as the IndyCar Series runs the second race of a six week straight stretch, perhaps Ganassi and Dixon aim to keep the pressure up on their competition. Dixon last won at Richmond in 2003, though he was the runner-up in 2007.

Action at Richmond gets started on Friday afternoon with practice and qualifying. The SunTrust Indy Challenge will run at 8:00pm (US Eastern Time) on Saturday night. This year's event will run 300 laps instead of the previous 250 a distance increase asked for by fans who clamored for a longer race on the action packed track.

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