These days, team owner Michael Andretti is far more comfortable sitting in front of the media than he ever was as a driver, but still, it’s not his favourite activity. So it was a pleasant surprise to see him twice visit the Long Beach media centre last weekend. But he had good reason: at this venue where he scored his first Indy car win (1986) and his 42nd and final win (2002), he saw three of his drivers finish qualifying in first, third and seventh. The next day, in the race, they were 1-2-4.
Mixed in with the pleasure was the satisfaction of knowing that Andretti Autosport’s form in St. Petersburg (first, second and sixth on the grid) had not been deceptive. The majority of IndyCar drivers and race engineers will tell you St. Pete and Long Beach are disparate in terms of corners, curbs and track surface, despite both being classified as street courses. But this year, at least, Andretti was the fastest team at both.
Yet for Andretti, who among the current IndyCar team owners has been the most loyal supporter of Indy NXT (née Indy Lights), the qualifying session and race at Long Beach also brought a different gratification: another of his protégés was proving to be the star that he knew he could be.
To recap, after becoming the only driver to have won the championship in all three categories on the Road To Indy, Kyle Kirkwood was unable to graduate to IndyCar with Andretti, for whom he’d won the 2021 Lights title. Michael’s Formula 1 dream with Colton Herta had fallen through, so last year the Gainbridge-backed #26 car remained occupied by America’s previous Indy Lights sensation. Andretti did grab one of his 2021 Lights drivers for the 2022 IndyCar season, but that man was the very well-funded Devlin DeFrancesco.
So Kirkwood was effectively loaned out, and remarkably the only team that found room for this phenomenon was AJ Foyt Racing. Kirkwood had tested Andretti cars on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course and at Barber Motorsports Park, and so arrived at Foyt knowing what a fast IndyCar should feel like. What he now found in his temporary berth was rather different. The pressure was off because no one expected him to transform Foyt’s squad into front-runners. But no one expected him to have so many incidents either. While his former Lights rival David Malukas was shining like a rough diamond at Dale Coyne Racing, Kirkwood showed only flashes of form, in between costly incidents. As he honestly put it, “We overachieved some places, and we underachieved by trying to overachieve at some other places.”
Source: Autosport