the New Zealand driver<\/a> by 12.49 seconds on the St Petersburg street circuit. Christian Lundgaard finished third.<\/p>\nPalou was leading on 59 of 100 laps. With six laps to go McLaughlin’s overtaking skills saw him move up the field in the battle for second with Lundgaard.<\/p>\n
McLaughlin was more than pleased with the “good start” for the season, but conceded he’d hoped for more after qualifying at the front of the grid.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\nMcLaughlin secured pole for the season opener at St Petersburg.
\nPhoto: DAVID JENSEN\n<\/p>\n
“Look, Alex was super fast, but you know I think it’s just a mixed bag on what tyre you start on,” he told SkySport.<\/p>\n
“Maybe we come back here again and maybe you start on reds, and you just get them out of the way.<\/p>\n
“We made the passes we needed to make at the right times, and I thought we maximised our day which is what we needed to do.”<\/p>\n
Fellow Kiwi Sir Scott Dixon had a weekend to forget, crashing out in the opening practice when he hit the wall. And in a further setback in today’s Grand Prix he lost a tyre on lap 40 and took no further part in the race.<\/p>\n
New Zealand’s Marcus Armstrong was 11th after starting seventh on the grid.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scott McLaughlin was runner-up at the Indycar Grand Prix in St Petersburg. Photo: AFP \/ David Jensen \/…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[32654,82724,115,25484,82723,82721,82722,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-174580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-audio","tag-current-affairs","tag-news","tag-podcasts","tag-public-radio","tag-radio-new-zealand","tag-rnz","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\/174580","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=174580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/p>\n