(By Eric Rood) – IndyCar season is underway and the season-opener on the streets of St. Petersburg proved an affirmation that races on temporary street circuits bring out some weird circumstances. In the season’s very first Free Practice, Will Power knocked his Penske Chevy into the wall while fiddling with the brake-bias adjust as he navigated the high-speed bend on St. Pete’s Bay Shore Drive. This is probably not a problem on a regular circuit, but a mid-corner bump required some countersteer that Power was not able to control with only one hand on the wheel.

Penske buttoned the car back up for Saturday’s practices and qualifying, which Power undertook with flu-like symptoms. He looked in fine form on the racetrack, though, topping the charts in the final practice and then romping to the pole—illness and all—by resetting the lap record at St. Pete several times.

However, Power’s symptoms worsened and series doctors eventually attributed it to a mild concussion. Oriol Servia, who filled in for Andretti Autosport last year after Justin Wilson’s tragic death, took over Power’s car at the last minute, borrowing a race suit from Penske driver Juan Montoya and having his helmet overnighted from Los Angeles.

Saturday’s practice, by the way, reignited a long-standing tiff between Sebastien Bourdais and Mikhail Aleshin, which dates back to Aleshin’s last IndyCar season in 2014. Bourdais knocked into the Russian driver on the final lap of Free Practice and the two exchanged heated words. And by “the two,” I mean “Bourdais did a lot of finger-pointing and gesturing.” For the most part, IndyCar tends to avoid these NASCAR-style “discussions,” but if you’ve followed his career much, you know that Bourdais finds himself in the middle of these exchanges regularly.

As for the race, Penske nearly completed a podium sweep with Montoya passing Simon Pagenaud for the race lead and holding it down to the finish. Andretti Autosport driver Ryan Hunter-Reay snuck into the final podium position by passing Helio Castroneves, another Penske driver.

The lowlight of the day, however, was certainly the 8,000-horsepower pile-up into Turn 4 that started with Carlos Munoz dumping Graham Rahal and blocking the narrow corner for more than half the field. Unfortunately, Servia was the third man in, having nowhere to go with locked brakes. With everyone ahead of Rahal completing an additional lap under safety car conditions, that effectively neutralized every one of the 11 or 12 cars in and behind the traffic jam.

If IndyCar is hoping for drama in the lead-up to the 100th Indianapolis 500 in May, they’ve certainly made a case for that this year in the opening races.