Ganassi team enters four cars for Indy 500

Ganassi Racing, one of the last major teams to enter the Indianapolis 500, submitted four cars for former winner Dan Wheldon and Scott Dixon, the IndyCar Series leader after the first two races this season.

With the arrival of the Ganassi cars late Thursday, it boosted the number of entries to 60. The Speedway will accept others that were postmarked before the midnight Wednesday deadline.

Dixon, the 2003 series champion, has a 5-point lead over Wheldon and Penske Racing’s Helio Castroneves after finishing second at Homestead-Miami and St. Petersburg, Fla. The New Zealand driver has been runner-up in three straight races and four of the past five going back to last year.

All the Ganassi entries are Dallaras, the chassis used on 53 of the 60 entries.

There are two more races, in Japan on April 21 and at Kansas Speedway on April 29, before the series heads to Indianapolis for the race on May 27.

“I’m just looking forward to it,” said Dixon, who will be trying for his fifth start at Indy. “Sometimes you just don’t have the equipment. But at the moment we definitely have the equipment. Team Target (Ganassi) is very strong.”

Champ Car

The first round of qualifying for the season-opening Vegas Grand Prix on a new downtown street circuit in Las Vegas showed balance for the Champ Car teams.

Paul Tracy, the 2003 series champion and the oldest driver in the field at 38, won the provisional pole for Sunday’s race with a time of 1 minute, 19.784 seconds (110.097 mph), followed by 22-year-old rookie Simon Pagenaud at 1:19.998 (109.803). Next was three-time defending series champion Sebastien Bourdais 1:20.197 (108.530).