Takeaways from IndyCar's season-opener at St Pete

Yesterday at 03:30 PM

If you missed the IndyCar Series Race 1 at the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, here's a quick look at the takeaways of interest from the 100-lap contest.

WHO WON?

Alex Palou of Chip Ganassi Racing. It was the three-time IndyCar champion's 12th career win (from 82 starts) and 33rd podium. It also marked Honda's first win of the year.

WAS IT A DOMINANT WIN?

It was not. Palou took the lead on the 75th lap, which he never relinquished, but polesitter Scott McLaughlin from Team Penske was looking like the class of the field while leading for most of the opening half of the contest. A tire strategy choice made before the race took him out of contention. He'd come home fourth.

DID ANYBODY ELSE COME CLOSE TO VICTORY?

Yes, Team Penske's Josef Newgarden chased down Palou over the last dozen laps, all while Palou was struggling to put Sting Ray Robb a lap down and saw a lead of five seconds evaporate and fall to less than one second. A shifting issue going into the last lap forced Newgarden to focus on resolving the matter, which let Palou's teammate Scott Dixon get by and take second.

WHO STOOD OUT BEHIND THE PODIUM FINISHERS IN A POSITIVE LIGHT?

* It was a quiet day by their standards, but Kyle Kirkwood (fifth) and Marcus Ericsson (sixth) got off to a good start with Andretti Global. The team was sharp on Friday, came close to pole on Saturday with Colton Herta who claimed second, and Herta was going well until a slow pit stop took him out of contention. But as a whole, the Andretti camp were the closest to Ganassi and Penske.

* Arrow McLaren's Christian Lundgaard led 23 laps, albeit while on a pit strategy that was out of sync with the preferred strategy. He'd fall back to eighth at the finish, but there was no denying that in his first event for the team, Lundgaard was the top performer, having led the team in qualifying and the race.

* His teammate Pato O'Ward, who had a forgettable qualifying run to 23rd, and had to perform an extra pit stop to deal with a punctured tire, salvaged what could have been a disastrous opening to his championship quest by taking 11th at the checkered flag.

* Dale Coyne Racing's Rinus VeeKay starred in qualifying by making the Firestone Fast 12 on debut for the team and turning it into a top 10—securing ninth—to give the team a boost from the opening race.

* Like O'Ward, qualifying didn't go the way Ed Carpenter Racing and new lead driver Alexander Rossi planned after placing 20th, but in the mix of race strategies on Sunday, he vaulted forward to grab 10th. ECR teammate Christian Rasmussen followed suit, turning his 24th-place start into a 15th-place finish.

* Graham Rahal was in the same situation, having started a lowly 21st and risen to 12th for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.

WHO DIDN'T STAND OUT BEHIND THE PODIUM FINISHERS?

* If there was a surprise during the weekend, it was the distance between Team Penske and its technical affiliate team at AJ Foyt Racing. With Santino Ferrucci's run to 10th in last year's championship, the best for the team in two decades, it was a surprise to see newcomer David Malukas start 17th, Ferrucci start 19th, and for the two to have relatively anonymous weekends on their way to 13th and 14th, respectively. It wasn't a terrible start, by any means, but to see Penske drivers start on pole and finish 3-4 while the Foyt drivers were more than 40 seconds behind Newgarden and McLaughlin at the checkered flag was a surprise.

* It was another soft start by the RLL team, which was led by Devlin DeFrancesco in qualifying (14th) and had Rahal fight from a rearward position to take 12th among the 23 finishers. Rookie Louis Foster didn't get a chance to help after being taken out on the opening lap.

* The Juncos Hollinger Racing team showed promise on Friday, but it didn't transfer into qualifying or the race where Conor Daly went from 22nd to 17th and String Ray Robb went from 26th to 21st, helped in part by four drivers crashing out of the race.

WERE THERE ANY MAJOR DRAMAS OR HIGHLIGHTS TO EMERGE?

* The first-lap crash at Turn 3, which took place for the second time in the last three years, carved three undeserving drivers from the contest as Nolan Siegel, Will Power, and Foster were done on the spot.

* Scott Dixon's radio was malfunctioning, which led him to use a low-fuel warning on his dash to know when to make his final pit stop. The stop ended up being one lap later than desired, and Palou was able to use what became an undercut to take the lead and the win.

* Colton Herta was the leader on lap 35. He pitted on lap 36, waited as his right-rear tire changer struggled to get the wheel onto the hub, and returned to the race in 13th. The team was unable to fill his fuel tank during the stop, so he returned on lap 47 to complete the process, which added a fourth stop to his day and killed any chances of recovering from the lap 36 stop. He'd finish 16th.

* And it was definitely a case of missed opportunities for Meyer Shank Racing. Felix Rosenqvist qualified third, teammate Marcus Armstrong qualified fourth, and they left the event with Rosenqvist in seventh and Armstrong out as a result of a mistake — contact with the wall — in 24th.