Arise, Sir Scott Dixon!

The holiday season is over, the new year is upon us, and most importantly, we’re less than two months away from the start of the 2026 IndyCar Series. Over the next two months, new signings will build chemistry with their teams, returnees will reacclimate to their cars, races in other disciplines will act as an unofficial preseason, and Dale Coyne will do his traditional wait until the last second to sign a second driver. So before anything crazy shakes the landscape, let’s review some of the headlines of the past few weeks.

Dixon earns NZ knighthood

As residents of a country that broke away from the United Kingdom and stayed out, it’s easy for us Americans to forget that places like New Zealand, which we think of as entirely separate countries, still recognize the British monarchy even after independence. Among the many trappings that entails, a select few Kiwis receive royal honors at the start of each year, and our own Scott Dixon earned his biggest yet. He’s been part of the New Zealand Order of Merit since 2009, both for his on-track excellence and his off-track charitable work, but on New Year’s Eve, he was officially promoted to a Knight Companion and will now be formally known as Sir Scott Dixon of Indianapolis.

Suffice to say, it’s a massive achievement for a man with a life already full of them. The big question now is how many swords people will give Sir Scott while his knightly status is still novel.

Legge pursues Desert Double

Katherine Legge was the most surprising absence from the 2025 Indy 500, and it looks like she’s out to rectify that for 2026. A Marshall Pruett piece on December 22nd confirmed as much, but to add some intrigue, she also expressed interest in pioneering a new double by racing in both IndyCar and NASCAR at their shared Phoenix weekend this coming spring.

The latter move, if she can make it, would form an intersection between her two most recent disciplines. After the last round of 500 talks fell through, Legge devoted her 2025 to the NASCAR Cup Series, where she made seven starts and dragged backmarker team LiveFast Motorsports to top-20 finishes at the Chicago street race and the Brickyard 400. Running IndyCar Saturday and NASCAR Sunday is certainly doable, but if she enters the former in an unchartered 28th car, she’ll have to battle the Premas and earn her spot on the grid the hard way.

Canapino takes a treble

In light of Argentinian driver Agustín Canapino’s chaotic exit from IndyCar in mid-2024, many fans up here in the States wrote him off as a hack who simply wasn’t worth the trouble of dealing with his…let’s just say passionate online fans. If that’s true, though, no one told him, because he just wrapped up an absolutely monster 2025. Over the course of the year, Canapino competed for and won Argentina’s premier series in stock cars, touring cars, and pickup trucks, making him a triple national champion for the first time in his career.

While it’s unlikely that any of this will put Canapino back on IndyCar’s radar, it is a worthwhile reminder that he was to South America what Scott McLaughlin had been to Oceania prior to his move here, and that it really is extremely difficult to translate driving skills between such radically different disciplines.