Last November, Kyle Kirkwood sat down for the kind of conversation a driver only has when a season has slipped through his fingers. He had won three races in 2025, more than anyone on the grid except the champion, and he had still finished fourth. The pace that carried him through the first half of the year drained away in the second, and he knew it.
“We looked to be fighting for the championship, and a lot of good things were coming our way,” Kirkwood said. “But I would say that that kind of deteriorated as the season went on. It was up and down.”
Seven months on, the 26-year-old from Jupiter, Florida, is no longer talking about a season that got away. He is second in the NTT IndyCar Series standings, 49 points behind Alex Palou, and he is the closest thing the paddock has to a genuine threat to the most dominant driver of his generation. As IndyCar returns to Road America for the XPEL Grand Prix, Kirkwood arrives not as the nearly man of Andretti Global, but as the driver carrying the team’s hopes of ending Palou’s reign.
The Andretti Problem He Decided to Own
What makes Kirkwood’s rise interesting is that it has happened inside a team that spent the past two seasons searching for its old identity. Andretti was once a road and street course powerhouse. By the end of 2025, it had become a team that could win flat out one weekend and disappear the next, and Kirkwood did not hide from that diagnosis.
“I don’t know where the pace has quite gone on road courses, but that used to be something that Andretti was phenomenal at,” he said over the winter. “I think over the past couple of years, it’s gone away a little bit. We’re really going to be honing in on that.”
His own numbers told the story in miniature. Kirkwood posted five top-five finishes in the opening nine races of 2025, then went the final seven without a single one. His three wins came at Long Beach, on the streets of Detroit, and at World Wide Technology Raceway, the last of those his first victory on an oval. They were a showcase of range. The drought that followed was a warning about consistency.
Rather than wait for the team to fix itself, Andretti rebuilt around the question. It hired former Team Penske executive Ron Ruzewski as chief performance officer, a clear attempt to import the operational discipline that has made Penske the standard for execution in American open-wheel racing. And it brought in a driver who spent 17 years learning that discipline firsthand.
Why Will Power Changed the Room
The arrival of Will Power at Andretti was framed by outsiders as an awkward fit, a proud veteran landing at a team in flux after being moved on by Penske. Kirkwood saw it differently, and he laughed off the idea that he and Power had any friction, even after Power clipped him during practice in Detroit.
“Him and I get along super well,” Kirkwood said. “We go and have dinners together. He’s actually one of the drivers that I get along with the most and I can resonate with the most.”
For Kirkwood, Power is less a rival for status than a tutor in the habits that separate a fast driver from a champion. “It will be great to have him on board to show us his discipline and what philosophy he has on what makes a fast race car,” he said. “We’ll learn off him.”
That humility is part of what has changed. Kirkwood came into IndyCar as a junior-category phenom who won championships at almost every level on his way up, then spent a difficult rookie year at a smaller team before Andretti gave him a platform. He has the speed of a driver who has always been the quickest in the room. What 2025 taught him was that speed alone does not beat Palou.
The Mountain Named Palou
Palou is chasing a fourth consecutive title and a fifth overall, a run that would place him alongside the rarest names in the sport’s history. He won eight races in 2025 and has spent 2026 doing what he does best, which is turning good days into points and bad days into damage limitation. His 49-point cushion over Kirkwood is comfortable without being decisive.
The chase is closer than it has been in years. David Malukas sits third, 68 points back, and Christian Lundgaard is within 96, which means a single rough weekend from Palou could redraw the entire picture. Kirkwood understands the math, but he also understands the psychology. Palou rarely hands anyone an opening. To beat him, a challenger has to be flawless across the back half of a long season, the exact stretch where Kirkwood unravelled a year ago.
That is why Road America carries an edge for him. Thirteen drivers tested at the four-mile Wisconsin road course earlier this month, with Santino Ferrucci setting the pace, and the long, flowing layout is precisely the kind of permanent road course where Andretti used to dominate and recently has not. A strong result here would be more than four positions and a points haul. It would be evidence that the team’s winter of honest self-assessment has produced something real.
A Different Kind of American Star
Kirkwood occupies an unusual place in IndyCar. He is one of the most credible American title contenders the series has produced in years, in an era where many of the fastest cars are driven by drivers from Spain, New Zealand, Denmark and beyond. He carries that without the manufactured swagger that sometimes attaches to homegrown hopes. His appeal is that he is candid about his flaws and clear about his ambitions.
He has spoken before about wanting to be remembered as a complete driver rather than a specialist, someone who can win on a street circuit one week and an oval the next. The 2025 season proved he can do exactly that. The 2026 season is about proving he can do it for an entire year without the second-half collapse that has shadowed him.
If he manages it, the conversation around Andretti changes completely. A team that has spent two years explaining what went wrong would suddenly have a driver capable of winning the championship it has not held since the days of Ryan Hunter-Reay. And Kirkwood, the kid who built his name on raw speed, would finally have the one thing that has eluded him, which is the discipline to turn it into a title.
The gap to Palou is 49 points with nine races to run. For the first time in a long time, Andretti has a driver who looks capable of closing it. Whether he can is the question that will define the rest of his season, and perhaps his career.
The Schedule That Will Decide It
Nine races remain, and the calendar is a mix of the layouts where Kirkwood has been brilliant and the ones where Andretti has lost its way. Road America opens the run, followed by a stretch that includes the kind of permanent road courses that exposed the team’s weaknesses a year ago. If the winter rebuild has worked, the evidence will show up quickly, in qualifying pace and in the ability to hold a strong car together over a full afternoon.
Kirkwood’s junior record is a reminder of how much raw ability he brings to the fight. He climbed the American open-wheel ladder collecting titles at almost every stage, arriving in IndyCar as one of the most decorated graduates of his generation. The talent has never been the question. The challenge has always been converting it into the relentless, error-free consistency that a championship demands across a long season, and that is the exact skill he watched Palou demonstrate while his own 2025 came apart. A title fight that once looked like a formality for Palou now has a credible second character, and Kirkwood intends to make the most of the role.
Sources:
- https://www.foxsports.com/stories/motor/kyle-kirkwood-marcus-ericsson-hope-fix-andrettis-inconsistencies-2026
- https://www.foxsports.com/stories/motor/indycar-storylines-season-alex-palou
- https://www.indycar.com/Drivers/Kyle-Kirkwood
