- Kyle Kirkwood closed the 2026 NTT IndyCar Series season as runner-up to five-time champion Alex Palou, the best finish of his career and Andretti Global’s best championship result since 2012.
- Kirkwood still trails Palou by 86 points in the final standings and has never won on a permanent road course in IndyCar, despite dominating those tracks in junior formulas.
- He says the gap is closing in small, specific places: short ovals, the Indianapolis 500, and the handful of mistakes that separate a strong season from a championship one.
Second Place Feels Different When You’ve Never Been This Close
Kyle Kirkwood has spent five seasons in the NTT IndyCar Series climbing one rung at a time. Twenty-fourth as a rookie with AJ Foyt Racing. Eleventh, then seventh, then fourth in his first three years at Andretti Global. This year he finished second, trailing only Alex Palou, who collected his fifth championship and a record-tying fourth in a row. For a driver who has never finished a season closer to the top, the number two carries a weight that outsiders might miss.
“It’s big,” Kirkwood said of the result. “I hope people consider us as the second-best team. We have a lot to build off of, right? We made a huge jump year over year. Now second in the championship.”
The jump is real. Kirkwood racked up 15 top-10 finishes in 18 starts in his No. 27 Honda, up from 10 of 17 the year before and 13 of 17 the year before that. Ten of those were top-fives, double his total from each of the previous two seasons, and his six podiums this year matched his combined total from his first 68 career IndyCar starts. He won twice, fewer than the three victories he collected in 2025, but turned far more of his opportunities into results that actually mattered to the standings. Last year he finished outside the top five in 12 of 17 races. This year that number shrank dramatically, and so did the mistakes that come with chasing results too hard.
86 Points and a Habit Nobody Has Broken Since 2022
The number that matters most to Kirkwood right now is 86, the final margin between himself and Palou in the 2026 standings. Closing that gap would be difficult in any circumstance. Doing it against Palou specifically means doing something no one else in the series has managed since 2022, the last year anyone other than the Spaniard won the IndyCar championship.
Palou’s dominance is built on a foundation Kirkwood has not yet matched: 25 career victories, 17 of them on permanent road courses, the type of track where technical precision and car setup tend to separate the field most clearly. Kirkwood has seven career wins, but six came on street circuits, tracks defined by walls, mistakes, and chaos as much as pure pace. He remains winless in 32 series starts on permanent road courses, a statistic that stands out given his background.
Before he ever sat in an IndyCar, Kirkwood was arguably the most dominant road racer coming up through American open-wheel ladder series. Of his 41 career victories in junior formulas, 32 came on permanent road courses. That history makes his IndyCar winless streak on those same types of tracks feel less like a weakness and more like unfinished business. This season offered signs it may not last. Kirkwood finished in the top 10 at every permanent road-course race on the 2026 calendar, from Barber Motorsports Park to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course to Road America, Mid-Ohio, Portland, and the season-ending event at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.
“I’ll look at myself, figure out which tracks I need to be better at, whether it’s just driving, performance, but also mistakes,” Kirkwood said.
The Track That Still Haunts Andretti
If permanent road courses represent Kirkwood’s biggest opportunity, the Indianapolis 500 represents his team’s biggest problem. Andretti Global, one of the most storied organizations in American open-wheel racing, has not finished inside the top five at its home race since 2022, when it managed exactly one such result. Since 2021, the team has recorded only three top-10 finishes in the 500, seven results of 30th or worse, and led just 69 laps combined across that span. Kirkwood’s own finishes in the race read 28th, seventh, 32nd, and 16th, a pattern that mirrors the team’s broader struggle at the one race where every IndyCar driver wants to perform.
Kirkwood identified Indianapolis as the area where Andretti most needs to improve, a notable admission from a driver who otherwise spent the season highlighting progress. It is also a reminder that closing the gap to Palou is not simply about one driver getting faster. Palou’s own success has come inside an organization, Chip Ganassi Racing, that has built sustained strength across multiple cars and multiple seasons. Andretti has not won an IndyCar championship since Ryan Hunter-Reay in 2012, and ending that drought will likely require fixing Indianapolis as much as it requires Kirkwood winning more often everywhere else.
Palou Narrowed the One Advantage Kirkwood Had
For years, street circuits were where Kirkwood held a clear edge over the rest of the field, including Palou. That gap narrowed significantly in 2026. Three of Palou’s five career street-course victories came this season alone, at St. Petersburg, Long Beach, and Detroit, tracks that used to belong to Kirkwood more than anyone else. It is a small but telling detail: the driver chasing the champion did not just fail to close the gap in Palou’s strongest areas, he watched the champion make real progress in his own best category.
That is part of what makes Kirkwood’s praise of his own season measured rather than triumphant. He is not pretending second place solves the problem. He is treating it as evidence that the approach is working, while being specific about what still needs to change.
A Team Finding Its Footing Together
Kirkwood was not alone in producing stronger results for Andretti this year. Teammates Will Power and Marcus Ericsson both delivered consistent performances in the second half of the season, giving the team multiple cars capable of running near the front at the same time, something that had not been consistent in recent years.
“You shine when you have all three cars up there,” Kirkwood said. “Our performance was starting to show as the second part of the season came around.”
That kind of organizational depth matters in a championship fight that spans 17 or 18 races across ovals, street circuits, and road courses. Palou has had Ganassi’s full resources behind him during his run of titles. Kirkwood’s bet is that a stronger supporting cast at Andretti, paired with his own continued growth on the tracks where he has historically struggled, gives him a genuine path to close an 86-point gap rather than simply hope to repeat as runner-up.
“Yeah, across the board we’re solid,” Kirkwood said. “Getting better every season. It’s just little things now that will make the difference in the championship. We have a lot of momentum going into the offseason. We have a direction.”
Whether that direction leads somewhere different than second place will depend on whether Kirkwood can finally win on the tracks that made him a star before he ever reached IndyCar, and whether Andretti can finally solve the race that has eluded the organization for over a decade. Palou has shown no sign of slowing down. Kirkwood, for the first time in his career, is close enough to make the chase genuinely interesting.
There is also a generational subplot here. Kirkwood is 26, still early in what should be a long IndyCar career, and his runner-up finish arrives at a moment when the series is watching a wave of young talent push toward the front, from rookie standouts to Palou himself, who won his first title at 24. If Kirkwood is going to build a championship resume rather than a collection of strong seasons, the next two or three years likely represent his clearest window, before the next generation of drivers behind him starts closing the same kind of gap on his own team.
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