For what feels like an eternity, the question opening any IndyCar Series season has been: ‘can anyone stop Alex Palou?’ or ‘does he have any weaknesses’?

On Sunday he came from what felt like nowhere to take a first win in St Petersburg leaving a trail of rapid and confused drivers in his wake.

Leading finishers

1 Palou
2 Dixon
3 Newgarden
Full results at bottom of page

An early strategy quirk denied what felt like the fastest driver - Scott McLaughlin of Penske - while fancy pitwork for Palou usurped Ganassi team-mate Scott Dixon, who’s still chasing a first win at this track despite his lengthy career.

Penske’s Josef Newgarden came from 10th on the grid to erase a five-second gap to Palou and harass him for the win, and just came up short of expunging the dark shadow of his win-then-disqualification last year in a story that came to dominate a large chunk of the season

And one other question we had - how would another Pato O’Ward McLaren team-mate reverse the trend of him destroying them - started with somewhat of a surprise as Christian Lundgaard ran an unusual strategy to star for a large chunk of the race but ultimately fell like a rock being on the wrong tyre late on.

Here’s how the race unfolded.

It was underpinned by a tyre compound battle and an early caution that appeared to give one side an advantage. With the soft tyres only expected to last a handful of laps, a lap one crash meant the cars that started on that soft tyre could pit, while the cars starting on the harder tyre would have to run that tyre at speed later on.

The caution was caused by Penske’s Will Power clipping Nolan Siegel with the usual St Pete lap one concertina effect at Turn 3 at least partly absolving Power of blame. Indy NXT champion Louis Foster was caught up in it too on his IndyCar debut with Rahal Letterman Lanigan.