Inside Kirkwood’s “very special” day of IndyCar dominance in D.C.
- Archie O’Reilly
- 1 hour ago
- 12 min read
That pounding through his chest and an instant flow of adrenaline. It was a familiar waking feeling in an unfamiliar setting for Kyle Kirkwood.
“There’s an instinct that you have when you wake up and your heart is already racing,” he says. “I only get that one other place - and that’s the Indy 500. Just that sensation, it gives it its own energy. That’s what this place had. This was a very special day.”
Having secured a front-row start on Saturday, he could picture a clear road ahead on Sunday afternoon. But this was not any road - and these streets weren’t any ordinary city streets on which the unwillingly anointed ‘King of the Streets’ typically plies his trade.
For Kirkwood, as one of eight Americans in the IndyCar field, gearing up to race around Washington D.C. and its famed National Mall - in the shadows of Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument - was an especially big deal. A once-in-a-lifetime deal, in fact, to race around his nation’s capital to mark the United States’ 250th birthday.
“There’s no comparing the night before the Indy 500. That is the biggest build-up ever… the cannon shot in the morning,” Kirkwood declared after qualifying. “But it will weigh more than a lot of other races on our calendar - maybe more so than any other except for the 500.”
This was a firm dismissal of sentiments being shared by many that the Freedom 250 was akin to IndyCar’s long-standing marquee event. But from dawn on Sunday, as he rose from his slumber in D.C., emotions were certainly drawn that no regular race on the IndyCar calendar can muster.
The uniqueness of the weekend was never lost on Kirkwood, who had already taken his warm-up laps in qualifying to look around in astonishment at the rows of people lining the streets. Non-suite tickets had been made free for the event, contributing to a total weekend attendance of 215,000 across existing IndyCar fans and, crucially, a new audience.
“It’s quite a distraction because you look out and it almost feels claustrophobic on the track,” he explained after qualifying. “Not just in the stands; everywhere around the entire track was rows of people, which was incredible to see.”
The race day spectacle turned heads again, foremost for Kirkwood via the seven different flyovers between the morning warmup session and race start. It was an attack-of-the-senses show of pageantry in a pinch-yourself setting, which even the drivers could not help but find themselves captivated by.
“Outside of the Indy 500, I don’t think there’s another race that you’d want to win,” Kirkwood reacts post-race, recounting his vivid recollection of the pre-race parade laps. “There’s people [in] rows of five in the pace laps, all the way around the track - 1.7 miles. You don’t have that vibe anywhere else other than the Indy 500.”
It was a weekend where the bigger picture could easily get lost within the grandeur of the event. But for Kirkwood, that could never have been the case. While swept up in the festivity, he was still kicking himself about the weekend prior in Markham, which ended with a self-inflicted crash as he clipped a jagged inside wall and was sent slamming into the outside of Turn 4.
It was the sort of moment that has become a rarity for an ever-more-reliable driver.
“[It] flipped a switch where I was like: ‘These mistakes feel terrible.’ I hadn’t had one of those in a very long time,” he admits. “Sometimes those are actually good for me because, all this week [before D.C.] I feel like I’ve worked harder than I ever have in preparation.”
Kirkwood had to be extra conscious of avoiding the same moments of scrappiness on Sunday in D.C. given, at 250 miles for the Freedom 250, this was to be IndyCar’s longest-ever street race. He almost had to channel the psyche adopted during his long-time gig as an endurance driver for Vasser Sullivan Racing’s GTD programmes in IMSA. Survival would be key.
That patient approach, though, was rather contrasted as he immediately took the fight to pole-sitting Álex Palou - the only driver ahead of Kirkwood in the IndyCar standings - on Sunday’s opening lap, resulting in an outside move for the lead in Turn 2.
“We knew it was going to be a battle,” he says. “You almost have to look at this race in every sense as a little 500 where it’s going to be so many [pit] stops. You just want to be there at the end and give yourself a good shot. That was a lot of the mindset.
“I’m sure it didn’t look like it on the start when I was around the outside of Palou. Quite honestly, that was somewhat unintentional. But it was an endurance mindset. It was keeping it off the walls, doing everything clean, hitting your marks, not making big mistakes. Everything off-line was very slippery; staying on lines, [crossing] Ts, dotting Is was a big part.
“We had the pace, the car, the crew. Everything was teed up for us. We just had to execute and not make any mistakes. After last weekend, I was very sure I was not going to let myself do that once again.”
Kirkwood led with poise but Palou kept himself in pursuit through the race’s opening stint. Naturally, it buoyed Kirkwood when his closest challenger was then removed from the equation after the first pit cycle, during which he had hit a laid-out Mick Schumacher tyre and was handed a race-ruining drive-through penalty for his troubles.
That incident for Palou had come under the third caution of the race, from which Kirkwood restarted in fifth, behind a selection of cars on an alternate strategy ahead. That caution promptly bred another, though Kirkwood had already gained two positions in the brief green window. He followed suit within five corners of the subsequent restart to lead once more.
By the time the second pit cycle had shaken out, Kirkwood held almost a 10-second buffer over Scott McLaughlin in second place. But on Lap 87, a fresh challenge brewed as backmarker traffic beckoned.
“Typically in those situations you get stuck behind lap traffic and you can’t pass,” Kirkwood assesses. “I probably passed eight or 10 cars in the race. That’s a lot for a street course.”
Indeed, within five laps of catching them, Kirkwood had made clinical work of a quartet of fast car-driver combinations - multiple having hit strife from the front during the race - starting with Christian Rasmussen, then Pato O’Ward, Marcus Armstrong and Louis Foster.
By the time that possible stumbling block was vaulted, McLaughlin had barely closed to within five seconds of the lead. There was no such effectiveness in traffic for the Team Penske driver, whose progress stalled in the middle of the group and allowed Kirkwood to grow an advantage upwards of 15 seconds.
“We were extremely fast,” Kirkwood asserts. “So quite honestly for our sport, I hope that part of the race wasn’t boring with me leading a lot of it. From the front, we just had a dominant car. It probably didn’t look that shiny for the lead.”
Through a final pit stop taken on the earlier side to avoid the clutches of the ‘danger zone’, should a caution have fallen, Kirkwood continued to remain safely out front. His lead wavered a little through more traffic, but the ruthless efficiency of his driving ensured a comfortable, 10-odd-second advantage generally remained intact.
As he continued to navigate the seven turns, a reminder of what was at stake coming with the backdrop of each corner as he continued to surge down some of the United States’ most iconic streets, he did have to compartmentalise preemptive visions of victory.
“It wasn’t easy, I’m not going to lie. There’s times where it’s like 100 laps in, I’m thinking about winning this race. I have to block it out, try and refocus, reset. I just told myself to reset. If last weekend is any indicator, as soon as you lose a little bit of focus, small mistakes are very consequential. Did everything in my power to not let myself drift away.”
It was a good job complacency did not creep in, as Kirkwood’s commanding advantage was slashed on Lap 123 after a rare crash for Palou, who had fallen from chasing Kirkwood to the lead to pursuing him to return to the lead lap after his earlier penalty.
The caution was brandished. A restart impending. Jeopardy, on a day where Kirkwood had successfully avoided as much. And now, he was not necessarily well-placed - on the harder primary-compound tyres against five drivers directly behind on the softer, theoretically quicker alternates.
“It’s not easy. I got huge wheel spin when I got to power,” he recalls, “which the guys on the alternate tyres didn’t have that big of an issue. So I was under a lot of fire.”
An immediate attack was launched by an opportunistic McLaughlin, for whom ending a near-two-year winless run was top of mind. He lunged audaciously into Turn 1, but heads-up in his own approach, Kirkwood was wise to the desperate dive, affording McLaughlin the inside line and, ultimately, a direct line to tearing apart the right-hand corners of his No.3 machine.
McLaughlin failed to make the corner and bounced off the tyre wall, which Kirkwood reacted well to avoid. With it, another contender was eliminated. But another restart was inbound, too.
“I saw him coming,” Kirkwood says of McLaughlin. “I defended a little bit but I was like: ‘He’s not going to try this.’ And he did. I thought he was going to make it stick initially. You’re focused on braking but you see where he’s coming from. I knew I had to give up the position and hope that I could cross him up on exit.
“Once he got alongside me? ‘There’s no way he’s stopping.’ Fortunately, I was able to hold Christian [Lundgaard in third] off. The yellow came out after that whole incident. Could have been a nightmare for us [dropping behind Lundgaard], being on primes, being the second guy in line to do a restart. Probably wouldn’t have ended up well for us.”
Still at the head of the field for what transpired to be the final restart of the race, Kirkwood nailed his jump and fended off any threat of pressure from Arrow McLaren’s young Danish driver. Not until the final lap, though, could he begin to accept the realisation of a historic win.
“I could let myself breathe a little bit, soak it in a little bit,” he remarks. “Kind of chilled out in that lap.”
As he took the chequered flag, three seconds ahead of Lundgaard, the eventual sense of calm that had emerged from 146 laps of tension turned into an eruption of emotion (and shortly thereafter a “failed miserably” celebratory burnout). His seventh career victory, this was a jubilant feeling for Kirkwood most alike - and maybe even more so than - that after his first success in Long Beach in his maiden season with Andretti Global in 2023.
“This likely is the most satisfying win I’ve had, just the magnitude of it,” he discloses. “It’s huge. This one and my first are pretty similar. Getting your first win in IndyCar is a very special moment - solidifies that your dreams have come true.
“As a little kid growing up in go-karts, wanting to do this your whole career, finally winning against guys you’ve watched on TV and admired for so long, being able to beat them is very satisfactory. Here, when you think about the magnitude, what this means, having this race in D.C., being the Freedom 250 as an American, it might top the first win for me.”
There was an element of seamlessness to the way Kirkwood performed, whether in the way he controlled the race or defied the adversity of the late restart. It was the perfect exemplification of the level-headedness that has continued to elevate the 27-year-old’s status every year of his young IndyCar career, towards being a title-contending force.
“I read a quote earlier that said: ‘The ones who make it look easy put in the most work on their own,’” recites Andretti team principal Ron Ruzewski, sitting beside Kirkwood in the makeshift D.C. media centre. “That’s exactly what he did this week.”
Kirkwood is spearheading an Andretti team that continues to click. They had the podium on lock before his crash in Markham, though they still secured a double-rostrum finish, as Marcus Ericsson won his first race for the team. Then Will Power third - for a third successive race - and Ericsson fourth, they backed up the display from Canada with a 1-3-4 result in D.C.
“Too bad Christian messed up our day a little bit,” Ruzewski quips of Lundgaard finishing in the runner-up spot. But this was still one of Andretti’s best race days in recent memory.
They have become buttoned-up again in a manner they came to lack. As Ruzewski points towards, a litany of pit-stop errors in Arlington back in March, despite Kirkwood’s win in that race, raised alarm bells and led to something of an inquest, which has since sparked a marked turnaround from a long-plaguing problem.
“We tried to give that race away a few times,” Ruzewski concedes. “It provided an opportunity for everybody to regroup and see where we need to focus and really hit every part of it - not just the people part: the equipment, the drivers and really apply the focus to just making sure that we are executing every week. There was a massive effort.”
Andretti now find themselves in their most well-rounded position for a long time. As well as improvements on pit stops, that spans the chemistry built within an excelling three-driver lineup and, chiefly, the work from the wider team to expand the strength often shown on street courses to the rest of IndyCar’s diverse range of tracks.
While Palou has won the other three street races, Andretti have still maintained their street-course prowess by winning all three of the new urban events in 2026, owing to Ericsson’s Markham success and Kirkwood in Arlington and now D.C.
“It starts with the engineering group,” Kirkwood shares. “We’ve elevated our game exponentially. It starts with them and the hard work that they’re able to put in. Us drivers, we just get in and drive it; we either go fast or we don’t. They’ve given us the tools every single weekend to go fast.
“Those efforts, that growth that we’ve seen everywhere else, is showing exponentially on these circuits that are brand-new because we’re putting in that much more effort than maybe some of the others are.”
This progress has helped to continue Kirkwood’s ascension of IndyCar’s pecking order in 2026, after rising from 11th in points in his first year with Andretti in 2023 to seventh in 2024, then to fourth last season. With three rounds remaining in 2026, he lies second, with a 19-point buffer to Lundgaard in third and 51 points to David Malukas in fourth.
He remains 91 points adrift of Palou’s lead - in what remains a heavy long-shot to win the title - but has at least cut his deficit from 133 points pre-weekend.
“I’m just going to go out there and try and win every single race and see where it goes from there,” Kirkwood explains. “I can’t control what Palou does. Maybe in very small circumstances you can. [But] in the sense of where he was going to finish today, there is no controlling that because you’re in the lead. We just had a very fortunate day in points.”
This particular day is going to take some time for Kirkwood to process. Maybe a little, he theorises, will sink in as he completes his race-winner media duties on Monday - or when he finally gets around to checking his phone. Or maybe when the striking trophy, featuring a design of the Capitol Building, is eventually delivered to his house.
Attention will have to swiftly turn to the final fortnight of the season, kicking off with an intense oval doubleheader at the Milwaukee Mile this coming weekend. That is after solving the primary stress of sourcing a suit for the as-yet-unknown formalities of the day after his D.C. win.
“IndyCar might be buying me a new suit,” he posits, suggesting he may require more than the sport coat he has in his possession. “So... 38 regular.”
Amid a keenness from key players outside of IndyCar and Penske Entertainment in favour of a repeat event next year, Kirkwood is undecided if he wants IndyCar to return to D.C. in the future, though mainly for reasons only the victor of the inaugural event could declare.
“Either no, I never want to come back here because I’ll be the only winner of this thing,” he grins. “Or biased in that, yes, let’s come back here because I want to win it again.”
If he remains the only winner on the streets of the US capital - and he will forever be the only driver to win the Freedom 250 edition - he is well worth the accolade, as any winner would have been on Sunday. His hands aching and left calf in pain from nearly three hours of hammering the brake pedal, he was certainly made to work for this victory.
As he exits the press conference, there remains maybe a hint of breathlessness. It will take yet more time for that heart rate - racing since the crack of dawn - to come down from a dizzying height that will surely remain forever standout within the resume of Kyle Kirkwood.
“To be able to win in what will be considered probably my home race, being the Freedom 250 as an American,” he says, “is something very special. I’ll cherish this moment for a very long time.”
Comments