Kyle Kirkwood, IndyCar’s latest winner, is an honest young man. That sometimes means he sounds cocky because he knows how good he is, but he has the stats to back that up. In the three stages – USF2000, Indy Pro 2000 and Indy Lights – of the Road To Indy, as it was known, he won all three titles and amassed 31 wins in 50 races. It seemed that the world was at his feet.
But Michael Andretti, whose team ran him to the Lights title, had no room in his IndyCar squad to accommodate Kirkwood for 2022, and so he found himself at AJ Foyt Racing, rowing along a car that was well off the pace. Frequently he pushed too hard and endured way too many incidents. “That’s completely fair to say,” he responded pre-season. “At the end of the day, when you’re 20th and you feel stuck, naturally you’re not going to just give up, you’re going to push to the absolute limits. In a sense that’s what we did. We overachieved some places and we underachieved by trying to overachieve at some other places!”
What was more needed a clean weekend at Long Beach.
