Dixon satisfied he and Ganassi maximized their car in the Indy GP

With his runner-up finish behind Power on the Indianapolis road course, the Chip Ganassi Racing-Honda driver racked up his third podium finish in five races, and moved to within 10 points of Simon Pagenaud’s championship lead.

He said: “I think today, we got the most out of it. The car was pretty strong. We had good pace, but we just couldn't hold on to the rear tires. We could close the gap. But then definitely the last sort of five laps or eight laps of the stint, we just couldn't put the power down and we were very loose.

“Obviously big congrats to Will. He drove a hell of a race. And it was nice to get some good points, you know, second in the championship and only ten out. Hopefully we can get on a roll here soon and start getting some wins.”

Some Honda teams, knowing that their aerokit creates more drag on the straights, had trimmed out, but with the side-effect of sliding more in the turns and therefore using up their tires. But Dixon insisted that the bigger disparity between the red sidewalled softer compounds and the black primaries was the right way to go.

“The harder you push, you just ran into more degradation,” he remarked, “but actually, I think that's fantastic. I think a good job by Firestone to have that. It makes it a lot harder to maintain the tires with degradation, and the difference between the blacks and the reds I think was perfect. “So hopefully we can mirror that for some of the road courses down the road.

“But yeah, the car was loose. We knew it was going to be loose this morning. And the adjustments we made didn't really fix it too much. It was a little bit better but first stop we had to take a bunch of front wing out, which helped a little bit. But we just couldn't hold on to the reds.”

Explaining his late pass on Helio Castroneves to claim second, Dixon said: “I think it was just strategy. He used new reds at the start. Everybody else was on used. I think he used reds, reds, reds and then blacks at the [final stint].

“So it's just part of the strategy. We used blacks on our second stint and we dropped back a fair bit. So yeah, [Castroneves] was a bit of a sitting duck at the end.”