Two-time defending IndyCar Series champion Alex Palou took the first step toward a possible three-peat with a victory Sunday in the season-opening Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.

The 27-year-old Spaniard completed the 100 laps on the 1.8-mile, 14-turn course in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1 hour, 51 minutes, 8.51 seconds.

He moved into the lead on lap 74 and finished 2.87 seconds ahead of Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Scott Dixon.

Dixon passed third-place finisher Josef Newgarden of Team Penske on the next-to-last lap.

Scott McLaughlin, who won the pole during qualifying Saturday, finished fourth.

Palou is a three-time IndyCar Series champion. In addition to 2023 and ’24, he also won in 2021.

Quiet time

Dixon ran the entire race without radio communication in a miscue that probably cost him his first career victory in St. Petersburg.

Team owner Ganassi said if the radio had not malfunctioned “he would have won — it was simple.”

Dixon instead was runner-up at St. Pete for the fifth time in 21 starts on the street course. He has eight career podiums but has never reached the top spot.

“I’m pretty pissed off. We had a good race going and we didn’t get it done, so it doesn’t feel good, that’s for sure,” fumed the New Zealander.

Dixon said it’s the first time in his career he ran an entire race without radio communications and he lost already spotty contact with the No. 9 crew around the 10th lap for good. He pitted based on his fuel gauge but not having the radio “ultimately cost us the race.”

“With not (pitting) when I should have, I think, with about maybe the same lap as Alex. We caught that traffic with about five or six cars and lost about two or three seconds on that in lap, so that was a bit of a nightmare,” Dixon said. “You have a fuel light so you know when the car is going to run out. I didn’t know if they could hear me, so I was just telling them ‘I’m just going to run to the light and see what happens.’

“Ultimately I think for me, it was just one lap too long. I should have pitted maybe when I saw (Palou) coming in.”

Ganassi said the team could intermittently hear Dixon — “sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn’t,” he said — but Dixon couldn’t hear them. The lack of communication caused Dixon to pit a lap too late for fuel and it cost him the victory.

“If everything was 100% he would have won — it was simple. He would have won the race. The race was over,” Ganassi said. “It was one stop to go, and we pitted a lap later than we wanted him to. That was the race. That was the difference between he and Palou.”

But it was still a tremendous opener for Ganassi, who’s celebrating his 35th season as a team owner this year. He noted CGR hasn’t been strong at St. Pete of late, so the 1-2 finish was promising for this year.

“Really good here for us in St. Pete — not one of our favorite tracks. We’ve been challenged here the last number of years,” Ganassi said. “We’re certainly the season favorite until next week or until the next race.”

New perspective

Michael Andretti was tanned and thinner when he made his way from his yacht to the starting grid for IndyCar’s season-opening race.

He was also relaxed.

Retirement is going better than expected for Andretti, who turned control of his race team over to Dan Towriss at the end of last season and no longer has any official role at Andretti Global. He wore an Andretti team shirt Sunday but after the national anthem didn’t head toward one of the teams’ three pit stands to oversee the race on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg.

Andretti instead headed off in the direction of Andretti hospitality — or maybe he was going back to his triple-decker yacht docked near Turn 10.

“No headaches,” he grinned of his Sunday afternoon. “It’s weird that I have no schedule. I’m not used to it, like, I don’t know what to do.”

Andretti, 62, is a new grandfather of two and has 11-year-old twins. He showed up in St. Pete and was seen earlier this weekend wearing shorts, a t-shirt and flip flops — an eye-popping sight to the team employees who had never seen their old boss so laid back.

“I’m happy. Everybody is telling me I look happy. I didn’t know I was that miserable when I was here before,” Andretti said.

He blamed his former demeanor on the pressures of running the race team — particularly the final four years, when he was denied a Formula One team by that series’ management and publicly feuded with IndyCar owner Roger Penske over Andretti’s gripes as to how Penske was running the series.