2024 Acura Long Beach Grand Prix Ends With Thrilling Win

By Brett Foote - April 29, 2024

Scott Dixon took home his second career win at the Acura Long Beach Grand Prix thanks to a masterful strategy and a little luck.

Each year, the Acura Long Beach Grand Prix never fails to disappoint fans with hours of thrilling racing action, all provided by a pretty vast array of vehicles, too. In fact, this water-front event features six different series – vintage IndyCars, GT racers, SPEED/UTV Stadium SUPER Trucks, Formula Drift, IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GTP prototypes and GT Daytona sports cars, and of course, the main event – the NTT IndyCar series. As is always the case, 6SpeedOnline was on hand to soak in all of this action, and as usual, it didn’t disappoint.

The main attraction at this year’s Acura Long Beach Grand Prix proved well worth the watch, as Scott Dixon took home his second win at this particular event, though it’s been nearly a decade since the first. Dixon’s 57th career IndyCar win was also his fourth out of the last six races, but it wasn’t exactly easy for the six-time champion, either. Rather, Dixon had to employ a masterful fuel conservation strategy to squeeze out his latest win.

Dixon wound up covering the final 34 laps of the race in his No. 9 Dallara-Honda on a single tank of fuel, in fact, which was good enough to claim victory by 0.9798 seconds over Colton Herta. “That was tough; that was really tough,” Dixon said after the race. “Honestly, I didn’t think we were going to make it, and they kept giving me a (fuel) number, and it just wasn’t getting … I was close but not enough. Luckily, we were on the safe side there.”

A winning fuel strategy wasn’t Dixon’s only stroke of luck either, as Josef Newgarden was gaining quickly until he was struck from behind by Herta, causing him to lose two spots after stalling out following that mixup. This same incident led to a bit of controversy after Herta wasn’t penalized, though the drivers reportedly had a civil conversation about it in the pits after the race.

“I think he (Newgarden) set up pretty wide and was cutting back in and was a little slower at apex, but ultimately it’s up to me to carry the right speed into the corner and not run into the back of people, and I just misjudged it,” Herta said.