After the team was unable to find a space for its 2021 Indy Lights champion in its four-car line-up in ’22, Kirkwood spent his rookie IndyCar season at AJ Foyt Racing. Although showing plenty of potential, the rookie was involved in too many incidents, something he admitted before the start of this year was a result of over-driving. He then looked highly impressive in preseason testing at Thermal Club for Michael Andretti’s team as the replacement for Alexander Rossi, and stated that he is savoring the handling characteristics of his new car.
While Kirkwood’s weekend in the opening round of the 2023 season at St. Petersburg may be best remembered for his leap over the stricken cars of Rinus VeeKay and Jack Harvey, the fact that he beat two Penskes and three Ganassi cars to get into the Firestone Fast Six in qualifying showed his latent potential. Unfortunately, a crash in the Fast Six segment confined his efforts, but Edwards isn’t surprised to see the 2021 Indy Lights champ’s basic pace.
“Kyle did those couple of IndyCar tests at the end of 2021 as a reward for winning the Indy Lights championship for us,” says Edwards, “so even though he was driving a different car last season, he had that in the back of his mind. And while we may not get the track time these days that we used to get, he and Jeremy Milless [race engineer] were often in the DIL simulator to work through that and get everyone on the same page. And right from the test at Thermal Club and the test at Sebring, Kyle has done everything we knew he could do and expected him to do.
“The mistake on Saturday [at St. Petersburg] means we need to work harder to help him eliminate those kinds of errors. Last year [at AJ Foyt Racing] we saw incidents and people said, ‘We didn’t think Kyle made those sorts of mistakes,’ but he was in circumstances where he felt he was having to over-drive, so we could be understanding of that. Now he doesn’t need to do that.
“In terms of his speed and his contribution to the team, we couldn’t be happier with him, and he’s latched on to [teammates] Romain [Grosjean] and Colton [Herta] to lift the whole team up.
“Kyle is very mature for his age, the number of steps he’s thinking ahead. Even when we ran him in Indy Lights we could see him working with all his teammates to say, ‘Hey, how can we collectively improve what we’re doing here?’”
“So yes, we’re very happy to have him back and we expect great things from Kyle.”
This weekend will see Kirkwood reprise his IMSA endurance driver role in the 12 Hours of Sebring, teaming with Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat in Vasser Sullivan’s #14 Lexus RC F in GTD Pro.
