Consistent Kirkwood targeting return to IndyCar winning ways

Written by Archie O’Reilly, Edited by Morgan Holiday

Kyle Kirkwood came out of his sophomore IndyCar season with a quirky statistic to his name.

Joining Andretti in 2023 after racing for AJ Foyt Racing as a rookie, the Floridian endured a season of peaks and troughs. He is the first to admit it was too inconsistent, albeit with lofty highs.

Kirkwood walked away with seven top-10 results to his name across the 17-race campaign - a marked improvement on the one top 10 finish he achieved as a rookie at Foyt. The campaign also saw him achieve his first two top-five finishes on the streets of Long Beach and Nashville.

But those first two top fives? Victories. And the first two wins of Kirkwood’s IndyCar career.

“Thanks for asking,” Kirkwood quipped when DIVEBOMB raised the statistic on media day ahead of the 2024 season. “I look at that. That’s not what I try to do, of course. It’s experience, for me - understanding some strategy stuff that I feel like I’m figuring out.

“There’s a lot of factors that came into play that kept us out of top five contention various different times. I think it’s just circumstantial that we only had two top fives and both of those were wins. The goal is next year to have consistent finishes.”

At that point, while Kirkwood felt the record was a result of circumstance above anything else, it did speak to the inconsistency he felt let him down at times. And his evaluation was correct: with experience quickly came a reduction of the same fluctuations seen in 2023.

Speaking in January 2024, Kirkwood felt he could improve his understanding of races and their cadence, when or when not to push and intricacies such as fuel saving. That banked knowledge ahead of his second season with Andretti and third in IndyCar paid off.

Kirkwood almost doubled his count of top-10 finishes from 2023 to 2024, with 13 results in the top 10 and only two lower than 12th last year. At the same time, with a solitary podium - second to teammate Colton Herta in Toronto - the peaks of 2023 were not matched.

But Kirkwood’s big goal was to improve his consistency. Mission complete.

While he did not return to victory lane, the simple fact of being inside the top 10 so frequently - and the top five on five occasions as his 2023 record was quashed - elevated him four positions in the final championship standings from 11th to seventh.

“I feel like I’m chipping away at it,” Kirkwood told DIVEBOMB this week, harking back to the record raised at the start of last year. “I’m disappointed that we haven’t gotten the wins we had in 2023. We’re also putting ourselves in positions to be a lot closer to a lot more wins.

“My goal coming out of 2023 was to get more top fives. We have definitely done so [and] put ourselves in position to win a lot more recently. But we still haven’t gotten those wins. It’s a two-edged sword. Coming into Long Beach is one of our best opportunities to do so.”

Now that he feels he has become more consistent, Kirkwood is targeting combining that reliability with the peak performance that earned him his victories in 2023.

“I learned how to be consistent,” he said. “I learned how to get ourselves in a good position. But I also realise that it takes somewhat of a conservative mindset to get the consistency. You need a little bit more aggression to be able to get the wins and podiums.

“Trying to balance that is the name of the game for me this year.”

Kirkwood has started the 2025 season with two more top-10 finishes, including a fifth place in St. Pete, and sits sixth in the standings heading into the third round. But with Chip Ganassi Racing’s three-time champion Álex Palou having won the opening two races in his search for a third successive title, Kirkwood is already 48 points back from the championship lead.

Top of mind for every driver in the field is figuring out how to stop the Spaniard’s charge, with Palou’s lead over second-place driver Pato O’Ward standing at 39 points.

“We need wins to be able to win a championship here because Palou is just walking away with it,” Kirkwood said. “We need to turn that ship around. We’ve got to do the same thing that they’re doing: we’ve got to win races. We can’t let them get a big head start.

“That is one thing that Palou has done in the past couple years, gets a huge head start, then everybody claws back at him at the end of the season - he’s on cruise control at that point. We need to not let him get out front and hold him back a little bit. That comes with not letting him win at all these tracks, especially the ones that we’re strong at.”

Returning to the streets of Long Beach, where he took his maiden IndyCar victory two years ago, Kirkwood already believes it is an event of significance in the long-term view of the season.

“This is a very crucial weekend for us to turn things around in the championship hunt,” he admitted. “Even though it’s still early in the season - a lot of people don’t look at points - if the guy is 60 points ahead of you, you’ve got to pay attention to that.

“There is a long way to go. You’re also falling behind very early, which is not something you want to do.”

With the team renowned for their street course package, Kirkwood believes Long Beach is one of Andretti’s strongest tracks and the perfect chance to claw back some of the early-season deficit.

Kirkwood himself has never finished outside the top 10 on the famed street track.

“Some people like to say I’m kind of a street course merchant,” he laughed. “I couldn’t tell you why I’m fast around there, because if that was the case I would take that to every single track I ever go to. I just find it really enjoyable to drive.

“We’re going to be looking at going for a podium this weekend. I think anything worse than that we’ll be disappointed with.”

The first two rounds of 2025 have marked Kirkwood’s best start to a season in his four-year IndyCar career. But while there has been improvement on the driving side, he attributes a lot of his improvement to gains made by the team.

“I would like to say it’s me,” he said. “But it’s not. I think I’m doing a decent job. The team has also put a huge effort into making sure that we’re quicker at some of these other tracks. Andretti has always been really good at street courses.

“We needed to get maybe a little bit better at some of the road courses. Maybe as the years went on, they degraded a little bit. Same with short ovals. I think that’s something we nailed last year and we’ve gotten closer on the road courses this year.”

Still, Kirkwood is not entirely content.

“I should be a lot more satisfied than I am,” he acknowledged. “If you look back at St. Pete - one of our better races - I pretty much followed Palou the entire race and watched him win, which is disappointing.

“Then Thermal we were on for what seemed like a locked top-four finish - two top fives in a row - we had huge tyre deg for five laps to go, which ruined our race and we finished eighth. Could be worse. As a driver, as a competitor, you always want better.”

While Andretti was one of only two teams with a consistent driver lineup between 2024 and 2025, there was change in the shape of the loss of a technical alliance with Meyer Shank Racing (MSR), who have since joined forces with Ganassi.

But while the alliance did enable a wider range of data and feedback, Kirkwood believes the loss of the MSR relationship is not all negative.

“More often than not, having so many cars under one umbrella confused us,” he said. “For instance, if we split up a test, everything was kind of irrelevant and we were basing everything off of their test.

“Even though you have so much information from running that many cars, sometimes it gets a little too confusing, especially when you have as many different dynamics among the drivers, how they want to have things. We don’t feel like we’re missing anything.”