Kirkwood eyeing IndyCar championship after Nashville pole
- Archie O’Reilly
- Jul 18
- 4 min read
Kyle Kirkwood is targeting what he believes to be a realistic shot at a first IndyCar championship crown as the series heads towards the closing stretch of the season.
The Andretti Global driver sits third in the standings after 11 of 18 rounds, trailing Chip Ganassi Racing’s Álex Palou by 56 points. He will start Sunday’s race at Nashville Superspeedway from pole, with Palou three positions behind in fourth.
“There’s seven races to go right now. We’re not far past the midway point in the championship,” Kirkwood said. “Fifty points is not a big amount when it comes to six or seven races left. Anything can happen from here on out.
“Once we get to about three races to go and we’re sitting in this position… right now, we’re focused on collecting as many points as possible, beating the people that we need to beat. We don’t need to take a huge whack at it. We don’t need to be like: ‘We need to win and Palou needs to finish fifth.’ That’s not really a focus.
“We feel like we need to execute as well as we can, get as many points as we can, but also try to beat the guys we need to beat, too.”
After finishing fourth in the standings last year, Kirkwood has continued his ascension towards a title fight with impressive consistency this season, only once finishing outside the top 10 so far and recording seven top-five results. A third-place finish last time out at Mid-Ohio - his first-ever podium on a road course - marked a fourth rostrum visit of the campaign.
He has now kicked off Round 12 in rampant fashion, too, recording a 196.852 mph two-lap average qualifying run to beat Team Penske oval supremo Josef Newgarden to the P1 Award by 0.210 mph. It marks a second pole in three years for Kirkwood on the 1.33-mile Nashville oval since its return to the IndyCar schedule in 2024.
“It was really good. Quick in practice. Quick again in qualifying there,” said Kirkwood, who also headed Saturday morning’s sole pre-qualifying practice session. “Happy that our pace has stayed true over the past three years that we’ve run around this place.
“I got more poles here now than anywhere else. A rare thing for me to say; people tend to think I’m a street course driver. But happy with our performance. Car has been very fast every year we’ve shown up here. Hopefully continues tomorrow.”
After qualifying, there remained a fair dose of unknowns heading into Sunday’s race, with only an hour of qualifying-focused practice before the drivers’ two-lap runs on Saturday afternoon. Saturday evening’s high-line and hour-long all-car practices will be most telling for race conditions and the most crucial opportunity for teams to learn lessons for Sunday.
Anyhow, Kirkwood initially observed a somewhat surprising amount of degradation in admittedly high temperatures this weekend. There is the extra factor for this oval event of the requirement to run two stints on softer, alternate-compound tyres.
“The tyre degradation’s not huge [but] it’s big enough to where you get scared of the tyre,” Kirkwood said. “Not in a bad way - not saying anything about Firestone. The car starts moving around on you a lot more. You’re not going that much slower; it’s not like a short oval in that sense.”
This year’s Nashville race will also be run across 300 laps and 399 miles - extended by 75 laps from 2025 - which Kirkwood theorises, by his maths, could be “only 10 minutes shorter than the Indy 500 if it was all green”. Much like at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, a race of this length will likely render starting positions less important.
“It’s going to be long. It doesn’t really matter where you start, if I’m being honest,” Kirkwood said. “I think people are going to look at this as an Indy 500: keep your nose clean, try to stay at the front of this thing, tee yourself up for the end of the race.
“Not falling in the trap of racing too hard and get caught up in something that doesn’t matter in the first hundred laps is going to be a focal point of everybody.
“It’s going to be hot [and] it’s going to be physical - not only for me as a driver, but everyone on pit lane for two-plus hours. Five stops are not easy on all the guys and girls out there on pit lane. Everything about this race is going to be tough.”
Sunday’s race - and drivers being pushed to their limits, as Kirkwood indicates - will run immediately after the FIFA World Cup Final between Argentina and Spain, which should provide a host of new eyeballs to IndyCar, should weather allow.
“I’m very hopeful it doesn’t rain. There’s rain on the horizon and that could put a damper on some things for us,” Kirkwood said. “This will hopefully just bring a whole new audience for IndyCar. That’s such a big opportunity for us [that] we’ll maybe not ever have again.”
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