INDIANAPOLIS — Kyle Kirkwood enjoyed the winningest season of his NTT IndyCar Series career last year, but the Andretti Global driver still finished fourth in the standings.
Kirkwood, who won three races last season, challenged Alex Palou during the early and middle stages of the season, but in the end Palou’s consistency was too much to overcome.
Kirkwood knows what needs to change for his team to battle for the championship.
“It’s important that we get those wins. Those wins are what kept us alive in the championship, and then it will be important to add it with some consistency,” Kirkwood explained. “The only podiums I got last year were three wins. We need more podiums. We need more top fives. We had a handful of top fives but not enough podiums.
“Then the races that we maybe weren’t so good at, thankfully Iowa is gone for us. That’s one we don’t have to fix because it’s now off the schedule,” Kirkwood said. “But Portland, Indy, GP were a couple tracks that we were not phenomenal at, so we need to fix that and we need to fix some of our short oval stuff.
“Even though we won on a short oval, some of the cars that were the fastest all went on, so we got a little lucky with that if I am being honest. So we need a bit of performance in those places, too.”
For Andretti Global, the Indianapolis 500 is always important.
“Maybe not as much for myself but there’s been a huge focus within the team,” Kirkwood said. “There’s a lot of things to learn there. We always try and come back there with better products, better cars, better performance. If we can just get a little bit better at qualifying, I think that’s been our weakness in the past few years is not qualifying well and then we feel like we’re on the back foot.
“We’ve raced to the front pretty much every year I’ve done it with Andretti. It’s just having that quality performance getting up there and staying up there is a direct correlation with how you qualify to how you finish at that race, and it’s important that we start to correlate that ourselves.”
Kirkwood in his fourth season with Andretti Global, is the team’s longest tenured driver. However, two-time series champion Will Power joins the team this year with Marcus Ericsson completing the three-driver squad.
“I’ve been with the team the longest, four years now. Worked with them the longest. But you’ve got Will that’s been in the championship now for it’s close to 20 years, or next year will be 20 years,” Kirkwood said. “In no way, shape, or form can I beat on my chest and be like, oh, yeah, I’m the leader because I’ve been here for a year longer than Marcus has. That’s just not the case at all.
“I think we all share responsibility in that sense.”
