After surviving a nip-and-tuck battle with Scott Dixon and Ryan Briscoe to claim the 2009 IZOD IndyCar Series championship, Dario Franchitti believes that 2010 will be an even harder season.
The Scotsman returned to IndyCar last year after a brief 2008 sojourn in NASCAR, and claimed five wins en route to an 11-point victory in the title fight over his Target Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Dixon — a victory that wasn’t sealed until the final laps of the season finale at Homestead Miami Speedway. We reckon that this season will see him deal once more with Dixon and Team Penske, which now sports a three-car operation with Briscoe, Helio Castroneves and new full-time driver Will Power. As for the dark horses — Justin Wilson and Takuma Sato come to mind, as well as the possible re-emergence of the Andretti Autosport team as a true contender — we’ll have to wait and see on those.
But it doesn’t matter what we think — to Franchitti, he’s expecting a litany of challengers for his throne.
“We know the competition is going to be tougher,” he said. “There will be the usual suspects that were in the title fight last year and I think you’ll add a couple more. We’ll have to work harder if we want to come home with another championship. To even challenge for another championship, we’ll have to work even harder. If we do our best, we’ll see if we can repeat.
“Right now, we’re just going to with the same attitude as last year, which was, ‘Let’s do our best and hopefully that will put us in contention.’“
You can check out highlights of Franchitti’s championship-clinching victory at Homestead last year below. Video credit goes to IndyCar.com.
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Materials from press releases were used in the making of this article.
