Motorsport: Dixon outgrows his NZ backers

Scott Dixon

The New Zealand investors who gave racing driver Scott Dixon a jump-start in his career say his American backers do not want them in the business.
Scott Dixon Motorsport, a company registered in 1998, has been put into voluntary liquidation and Dixon is paying back shareholders.

About 30 shareholders - including car industry magnate Colin Giltrap and businessman Sir Roger Bhatnagar - voted unanimously to let Dixon go, said company chairman Peter Johnston.

The shareholders had put up cash to put Dixon behind the wheel in the Formula Holden Series in Australia. They continued to support him with wages while he raced.

Dixon became the 2003 IndyCar series champion and has been trying to get a place in a Formula One team.

The Herald was told that shareholders had little choice but to cut their ties with Dixon, but they were rewarded for their initial investment.

Ganassi Racing, which signed Dixon in 2002, did not want the driver's Kiwi management team along for the ride, said shareholder Nelson Marshall.

"If we had kept on with Scott Dixon we were restricting his further progress because no big race company would want somebody that's got a management company run by a committee on the other side of the world telling them whether or not he could race," he said.

"[Ganassi] just said, 'If you want to drive we'll give you a drive, but we don't want all your management'."

Mr Marshall said Dixon always had the option of paying out his investors. He said the shareholders' aims had been to get Dixon into Australia and then to America - which they had achieved.

"He's now paying us back [the investment]. We all doubled our money, if not more."

Mr Marshall said there were a number of meetings before shareholders unanimously decided to wind up the company.

"I never saw it as an investment. I saw it as a way of getting Scott into the higher levels of motorsport, which he could never have done with the financial backing he had."

Glenys Dixon said the investors enabled her son to keep racing when the family could no longer afford to keep financing him.

"[The investors] say Scott out-grew them - as far as he was overseas - and it was just too hard to manage from back here in New Zealand.

"It was just too difficult for the [American] teams to be able to negotiate things. They suggested it would be a better idea if he was on his own with a manager."

Liquidator Glenn Nightingale said Scott Dixon Motorsport did not have any creditors.