ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Scott Dixon ran the entire IndyCar season opener without radio communication in a miscue that probably cost him what would have been his 58th career win and his first ever on the downtown streets of St. Petersburg.
The six-time season champion of the American open-wheel series finished second to winner Alex Palou in a 1-2 showing for Chip Ganassi Racing on Sunday. The team owner said if the radio had not malfunctioned, Dixon “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 top-three finishes on the circuit but has never reached the top spot on the podium there.
“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 44-year-old New Zealander.
Palou has won the past two IndyCar season titles and three of the past four. The 27-year-old Spaniard now has a dozen career wins.
Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden, the Tennessee driver who is a two-time series champion and the winner of the past two editions of the Indianapolis 500, completed the podium Sunday.
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 said 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 could not hear them. The lack of communication caused Dixon to pit a lap too late for fuel, and that 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,” the team owner 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 is celebrating his 35th season as a team owner this year. He noted CGR has not been strong at St. Pete of late, so the 1-2 finish was promising for this year.
Palou takes a 10-point lead over Dixon into the next event on March 23 in Thermal, California.
“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. I think our cars are better than they were a year ago, at least here in St. Pete.
“If you saw how we ran here the last, like I said, number of years, it wasn’t great. It was OK, we hung on, but we were clearly being beat by some of the other teams, and that wasn’t the case this weekend. So it was nice.”
Marcus Ericsson had been the most recent driver to win for Ganassi in St. Pete, doing so two years ago. Prior to that win, it was Dario Franchitti in 2011.