Is it Alex Palou season again, or will someone else rise to the occasion and take down the three-time defending INDYCAR champ? We won’t know that answer for at least a few more months, but we do know that Palou’s quest to win his fifth INDYCAR title begins with Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scott McLaughlin will start the race in pole position, with Marcus Ericsson starting second. Dennis Hauger will open the race in third, while Palou will start fourth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sunday’s race and the 2026 INDYCAR season officially begin at noon ET, and you can watch it on FOX and the FOX Sports app. You can also stick around here for live updates from Sunday’s race.\u00a0<\/p>\n
11:18a ET<\/p>\n
Live Leaderboard <\/p>\n
1:21p ET<\/p>\n
Scott Dixon loses wheel <\/p>\n
1:07p ET<\/p>\n
Will Power’s day is over <\/p>\n
12:35p ET<\/p>\n
Jon Gruden gets engines started <\/p>\n
11:41a ET<\/p>\n
The basics of Sunday’s INDYCAR race at St. Pete <\/p>\n
11:40a ET<\/p>\n
What to know entering 2026 INDYCAR season <\/p>\n
Live Coverage for this began on 1:22p ET<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is it Alex Palou season again, or will someone else rise to the occasion and take down the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-174097","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174097","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}