Smoke was seen coming from the left side front of the #9 car on the fourth warm-up lap before flames were spotted licking the left rear wheel.
Dixon continued in hopes the fire would extinguish on its own but the team was forced to pit.
The team dropped three laps replacing the burnt brakes, which fell to bits when Dixon brought his car to the lane.
“We haven’t looked at the data yet, it looks like with the track conditions and air temp being so cold, I would assume he was using brakes to generate heat to get tyres warm, which is something that everyone does,” Julian told Speedcafe at Indianapolis.
“Whether we had a piston stick or he just was too aggressive with it, it generated enough heat that it caught fire on a couple of the corners of the car there and burned the left rear down pretty hard.
“We had a brake rotor that basically fell into pieces when we took the wheel off, so at that point you’ve got no brakes. We had to race back to the truck and get another calliper and rotor and pads and try to fix it just to make it safe.”
It was a case of rocks and diamonds for Chip Ganassi Racing.
Dixon’s race was over before it began. Kyffin Simpson was mired in the incident that was triggered by Kyle Larson and took Sting Ray Robb with him. However, there were smiles in the CGR cam courtesy of race winner Alex Paou.
Of all the issues to suffer, Julian said it was unusual that Dixon’s brakes would be engulfed in flames.
“It’s a very fine line on how much heat you generate through the callipers and then damage your seals and they’re sticky,” he explained
“That’s what I mean by getting all the details right when you have the car under you to do it and get all the little things to come together. It’s very, very rare that it all falls in place.
“Pretty unfortunate for Scott, obviously. I want him to have another couple of these [Indy 500 wins] under his belt, but that’s why you have to have a team that’s got a couple of bullets in the chamber that can you can overcome some of these challenges.
“Scott and Alex complement each other pretty well ,and they use each other’s data and look at each other’s information to improve each other, so they push each other pretty hard. I feel pretty bad for Scott that his day was done at the start of the race.”
It was a trifecta of fumbles for the Kiwi contingent at Indianapolis. Scott McLaughlin crashed before the race even got underway and then Marcus Armstrong had a close call with Marco Andretti at the first turn of the first lap.
Armstrong had his own issues during the race and fell a lap down after a penalty for a Safety Car restart violation.
“I’m sorry to the team for getting a questionable penalty on the restart,” said Armstrong.
“We went a lap down because of that. Otherwise, we were kind of in the game. It was a trying week, after the accident and everything, but I think we handled everything really well.
“We went forward several places, so good job to the team, the car was strong.”
IndyCar continues on the streets of Detroit on June 2 (AEST).
Discussion about this post