ST. PETERSBURG, Fla – The new day is dawning. This weekend, will mark the first race of the 2019 NTT IndyCar Series season. A new year is always met with a lot of uncertainty. But, for a team like Team Penske, the annual stop on the streets of St. Pete if the first true test to see if they fixed their issues from last season.

See, the Penske drivers had a bit of a rare disadvantage in the series in 2018. The Honda teams had the preferred engine package on road/street course races. That’s why when Honda’s dominated the speed charts on Friday, it wasn’t too surprising to the Penske drivers.

Felix Rosenqvist topped the speed charts in session No. 1 with a lap of 1:01.8215-seconds in his No. 10 Honda. His Chip Ganassi Racing teammate of Scott Dixon was fourth (1:02.1309-seconds) in his No. 9 Honda.

Two Andretti Autosport cars of Ryan Hunter-Reay (1:02.0636-seconds) and Alexander Rossi (1:02.1470-seconds) were second and fifth respectively.

Another rookie in Marcus Ericsson (1:02.0811-seconds) was third while 2017 Indy 500 champion Takuma Sato was sixth to give Honda 1-2-3-4-5-6 on the speed charts.

In the second session, Honda went 1-3-4-6-7.

The top Chevy driver was Josef Newgarden in seventh in session No. 1. Penske, went 7-10-12 in that practice and 9-10-17 in session No. 2.

Take this stat for what it’s worth, over the last 10 street course races, a Penske driver has won just once. But, since 2016, Penske has won 26 times overall. The next best, is eight.

Since Chevy returned to the series in 2012, they’ve reached victory lane 73 times in 118 tries. They’ve had double digit victories in all but one season – last year.

Chevy won six times in 2018, all by Penske. But, just two times did they win over the final 11 races. That’s something that Penske hoped to improve on over the offseason. They’ve been so good on superspeedway but struggled on street courses. They had to find a balance to not go backwards on tracks like Indy, Pocono and Texas but also make significant gains at St. Pete, Long Beach, Detroit and Toronto.

“Yeah, I mean, obviously that’s exactly what we need is more consistency,” said Will Power. “Definitely was disappointed not to be a legitimate contender at the last race. Obviously still a great year to win the Indy 500, top of everyone’s list in IndyCar. You want to be able to fight for that championship (too).”

Power, said that the team had a lot of development between last September and now and that he thinks they found some improvement. He credits Chevy for the new found development.

The 2017 season champion and teammate of Power in Newgarden, agrees.

“Certainly we feel really prepared with Chevrolet,” said the Tennessee native. “We’ve done quite a bit of work with them this off-season to try to push to be better in all areas. They’ve done a great job with our new engine. We’re excited to turn it fully loose. We have to hold back in the off-season, don’t get to fully unleash the thing. We’re excited to see fully what we’ve got this weekend. They always do a great job.

“On the team side, we’ve extracted a little bit more out of these cars, particularly on street courses, I think we’re going to take a step, which we needed last year. Time will tell.

“We need to be more well-rounded. For our performance for the 500, our performance needs to stay the same there. We had good engines and cars there with Will (Power) winning the race. We don’t need to drop there, but improve the other area. Street courses, were the biggest area where we were lacking. You categorize them for sure. Just because you make a gain on a street course, it won’t necessarily translate to a road course. So we’re targeting all that.

“It’s not just the engine side, it’s the car side, too. We needed to be better as a team overall in some areas. I think street courses were probably number one where we kind of decided we needed to be better.

“I think we’ve made some good steps. Like I was saying, we’re going to find out in another hour and a half if that’s the case, but I think we’ve made good progress.”

Simon Pagenaud also went into the offseason with the same thinking as his teammates. Their unified goal of getting better on street courses but not drop off from the superspeedway success is the key to contending for this year’s championship.

“When we go into the off-season, we sat down and tried to pinpoint exactly what we needed to be more competitive and consistent,” said the 2016 season champion. “We had a priority list of how we needed to improve and how much we need to improve on street course, road course, speedways, obviously on speedways, we had less margin for improvement because the cars were really good. We thought the street course was an area we really needed to work on.

“The team took on a project and really worked really well. We made good improvement already and we’re at the beginning of the program still, there’s still more to come. But we think it’s a good first step going into the season. We should be in good position.”

All the drivers said that the testing at COTA wasn’t a good gauge on how they’d stack up and that they didn’t know if Chevy had the engine detuned a bit in their tests. He also said that they had to work hard to find more speed because there’s not much they could improve on the engine side of things.

“I think testing is never that good of a gauge,” Power said. “I think the first race you get a really good understanding of where everyone stacks up team-wise and manufacturer-wise. Time will tell in the next couple days where we stack up.”

“Not sure it’s going to be a big change, because the engine rules are pretty much frozen right now. There’s nothing you can really change except for I think exhaust pipes. But, yeah, we are interested to see here at a street course, because the street courses were where we suffered the most last year.

“Definitely we do have a different package with better drivability. I think we found some power. We’re really interested to see where we stack up.”

Pagenaud, ended 2018 with a ton of momentum. From the Indy 500 on, he never finished outside of the top 10. He thinks St. Pete is very important to keep that rolling into 2019.

“It’s obviously super important to start the season well, in my opinion,” said the Frenchman. “Just momentum. Momentum does everything for you when you start a season. If we can have great momentum to start, would be okay. It’s always easier to credit these points in the bank at the beginning than doing it in the end.”

“Certainly I personally feel a lot more confidence than I was last year at the beginning of the year. That’s awesome to feel that way.”