“It goes quite far back, my and Scott’s story,” says Emma Davies Dixon, wife of 2008 Indianapolis 500 winner and four-time Verizon IndyCar series champ Scott Dixon. “We met through a mutual friend.”
According to Emma, this first meeting was, well, underwhelming. “He was quiet,” she recalls. So quiet, in fact, Emma found him somewhat off-putting. “He was this super-shy guy and I wasn’t very friendly.”
A few years later, in March 2006, that mutual friend phoned Emma – who, after finishing her degree at university, had moved to London, where she worked as a presenter for SkyTV.
“Do you remember that guy?” her friend asked, referring to Scott. Yes, Emma said. She did.
“Well, he’s in London, and he’s on his own for a few days,” her friend said. Would Emma be willing to meet up with him? Emma, always outgoing, said yes.
Scott and Emma met for drinks and then dinner, along with Emma’s best girlfriend, whom Emma had brought along as a buffer, just in case. When Scott arrived, Emma recalls, “I could tell he’d had some Dutch courage.”
She explains, “He had a little red wine smile.”
This time, much to Emma’s surprise, meeting Scott was not underwhelming. It was quite the opposite.
“We just really connected,” Emma says. So much so, “my friend literally left me. She said, ‘I’m going to leave you to it.’ We were getting on that well.”
Clearly, Scott agreed. The next morning, he texted Emma and the two met up again. “We were smitten after the second day,” Emma once told a reporter.
But however well they got on, however smitten they were, what future did they have? After all, Scott was an Indy car driver from New Zealand who lived in the United States. And Emma, who had gained considerable renown as an 800-meter runner, representing Great Britain in international competition, “was having a great time in London after earning my degree and I’d just gotten a dream job.”
Still, when Scott invited her to New York the next month, Emma accepted. “He was like, ‘Come to America. Just take a chance.’”
So she did. Already, she could see that what she had with Scott “felt so different from anything I’d had before.”
That sealed the deal. Just a few short months later, Emma packed her things and moved to America to be with Scott. And by December 2006, they were engaged. In February 2008, Emma and Scott tied the knot.
“We got married in Lord March’s private estate,” fittingly, the site of the annual Goodwood Revival and the Goodwood Festival of Speed. (Lord March, Emma explains, “is very close friends with Scott’s manager, (former Formula One and Indy car driver) Stefan Johansson.”) The estate features a “Downton Abbey”-style residence, called Goodwood House, built in 1697, by a son of King Charles II.
“It’s very beautiful,” Emma says of the estate. “We really got spoilt,” adding, “it was amazing. It really was.”
For Emma and Scott, 2008 was “a magical year.”
“We got married in 2008. Scott won the Indy 500 in 2008. He won the championship in 2008.
“Scott had just gotten his pilot’s license and we used to fly to the races in his little Cessna,” she recalls with nostalgia.
And one more amazing thing happened in 2008: “I fell pregnant with Poppy,” the couple’s first child, born in 2009, just hours after the checkered flag at Watkins Glen. Scott finished third before rushing home for the birth. A second daughter, Tilly, came two years later.
What’s the secret to the couple’s relationship? Simple.
“We’re polar opposites,” Scott once told a reporter; and opposites attract. “She would happily talk to a brick wall and have a nice conversation,” he said, adding, “I would be the brick wall.”