When it comes to the greatest drivers in the history of the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, the conversation begins and ends with Scott Dixon.

With six Indy car wins in 13 attempts, including four wins in a six-year period from 2009 to 2014, Dixon has earned the title “Mr. Mid-Ohio.”

Tickets for the 2020 Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio are now on sale . Be sure to visit MidOhio.com for more information or to order tickets to one of the most anticipated weekends of the summer on the NTT IndyCar Series schedule.

Dixon won his sixth Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio last July when the five-time NTT IndyCar Series champion started eighth and led 38 laps and held off his rookie teammate Felix Rosenqvist to claim the victory.

What is it about the 2.258-mile, 13-turn road course in Steam Corners, Ohio that has allowed Dixon to have a “mastery of Mid-Ohio?”

“You can’t put your finger on it because if you could actually do it you would replicate it at a lot of other tracks, too,” Dixon told INDYCAR Mobile powered by NTT DATA. “It’s the combination of a track that suits my style, a track I really enjoy combined with a team that has had a lot of success there.

“It’s a match made in heaven.”

Dixon, a five-time NTT IndyCar Series champion and winner of the 2008 Indianapolis 500, will return in the famed No. 9 PNC Bank Honda for the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio on August 14-16. Dixon has 46 career IndyCar wins, third on the all-time list just behind Mario Andretti’s 52 and AJ Foyt’s 67. But just because Dixon turns 40 on July 22 - just a few weeks before heading to the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course - he still has plenty of racing left in his career, and hopefully more wins at one of his favorite tracks.

“I love the high-grip, high-load, super late braking and a tire you can lean on,” Dixon said. “Everybody has a style they started with or something for me that track is quite similar to some of the tracks I started with in New Zealand.”

In two attempts at Mid-Ohio while he was in CART, Dixon’s best finish was fifth in 2002. Team owner Chip Ganassi moved his team over to the IndyCar Series in 2003 and at that time it was an all-oval racing series. The IndyCar Series added two road courses to the schedule in 2005 with stops at Sonoma Raceway and Watkins Glen International along with the street course in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In 2007, Mid-Ohio was added to the schedule and gave Honda a big race close to its Ohio manufacturing facilities. That year, Dixon gave Honda and its employees reason to celebrate when he started sixth, led 29 laps and drove to victory in Indy car’s return to the historic track located midway between Cleveland and Columbus.

“It was big, and we won it,” Dixon recalled. “There was a big crash in Turn 4. You always want to run at these places like Watkins Glen and Road America and some of the ovals here and there. Mid-Ohio has a lot of history to it. To me, it just gels. These are the places when you see them coming up on the calendar you look forward to getting to them.

“When you’ve gone from a mostly road racing background in America to CART and then to the IRL that back in those days was all oval based and they started adding road courses, that transition was a lot of fun. You welcomed it with open arms.”

The following year, the Champ Car World Series merged with the IndyCar Series to create today’s NTT IndyCar Series.

After a third-place finish behind Team Penske’s Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves in 2008, Dixon scored his second Mid-Ohio win in 2009 when he led 51 laps in the 85-lap contest. Dixon finished fifth in 2010 in a race won by his then-teammate, Dario Franchitti.

In 2011, Dixon won the pole, led 50 laps and drove to his third Mid-Ohio win in five years. He went back-to-back in 2012 after leading 26 laps. Following a seventh-place finish in 2013, Dixon was back in victory lane at Mid-Ohio in 2014, despite starting way back in 22^nd place. Dixon used some brilliant pit strategy to lead 45 laps on his way to his fifth win at Mid-Ohio.

In 2015, Dixon finished fourth before the worst finish in his Mid-Ohio career: 22^nd in 2016 after suspension failure following 27 laps.

“It was one of those situations where we were trying to go off sequence and had I not passed Helio it would have ruined our day anyway,” Dixon recalled. “Most of the time you have a 50/50 shot trying to pass him and it just didn’t work out. That is how racing goes occasionally. That was a frustrating one.

“Obviously, you don’t want to be running around the back of the pack but what led to that was we had a car that was either in the top two in every practice session until we got a little too overconfident in qualifying and decided to sit out the last few minutes of the qualifying session put us back to 10^th. When you are tenth at Mid-Ohio that is pretty hard strategy-wise to make up.

“As it played out Helio Castroneves was just trying to cover us and ended in tears.”

After finishing ninth in 2017 and fifth in 2018, Dixon reclaimed his throne at Mid-Ohio and is “The King” once again.

“You can only feel like ‘The King’ when you’ve won and it had been quite a while since we had won at Mid-Ohio,” Dixon said. “The sixth win, it feels really good, just for the sheer fact that we hadn't won here since 2014. We've won a lot here as a team, but it's been a while since we've won.

“There's always races that you can analyze and maybe work out a little bit different. But today was a good hard race, and man, we really worked for it.

“What is more shocking is up starting sixth and eighth in the field at a track where you can’t pass. It was super exciting today and a crazy finish with Felix racing us hard at the end.”

“It’s hard when you go into a one-lap shootout when you bring a knife to a gun show,” Dixon said. “It was really, really tough.

“As always, super-hard racing.”

Over time, more and more road and street course races were added to the schedule but only the race of the streets of St. Petersburg has been on the schedule without interruption longer than Mid-Ohio. There remains the question of how Dixon has been able to excel so well to create his “Mid-Ohio mastery.”

“I think it’s the combination of my style and the places that I like but also the team,” Dixon said. “I think that combination alone has produced some good results. It’s just one of those places where I’m really quick and I love going there. The first day I went there in an Indy Lights car to the running around there now it’s always enjoyable. It’s always fun. It’s like a little bullring. You keep pushing harder and extracting a little bit more speed out of that place. To me, it’s a lot of fun.

“It’s more of a momentum track so if you have a car that works well you keep building. In qualifying that is why you see cars keep building in speed. It’s a high downforce track so in theory that’s really not a great match for the Honda Aero Kit. We saw that at Alabama, too. The horsepower helps to a certain point. That is why the street courses have been so good for us – the short, second gear acceleration areas, Honda does really well.

“I think with a fairly high average speed on a road course is not the best match but HPD and Honda have done a tremendous job with the horsepower of the engine.

“Added to that the fans of that race, it’s such a great family atmosphere and people camp and the people in the campgrounds, it’s just a cool place.”