(Photo: Road to Indy)
By Aaron Bearden
The 2021 Indy Lights season is unique in that it has three different scholarship winners all competing in the same season due to the tour’s canceled season in 2020 and the addition of a Formula Regional Americas championship scholarship. With the tour’s season halfway complete, Motorsports Beat has caught up with each of the scholarship drivers to see how their seasons have gone to date.
Kyle Kirkwood is starting to deliver the sort of runs he’d hoped to provide when he came to Indy Lights for the 2021 season. The Andretti Autosport is just doing so a bit later than he’d hoped – both on the schedule and calendar.
Had things gone according to plan, there’s a chance that Kirkwood would be competing in the NTT IndyCar Series right now. The 22-year-old was the first of three drivers to secure a scholarship to run in Indy Lights this season. But at the time he won it, Kirkwood assumed it would be for 2020.
His scholarship came from a championship in the 2019 Indy Pro 2000 season, where Kirkwood was utterly dominant and won nine of the final 11 races to secure the title with ease. He had every intention of claiming the 2020 Indy Lights title and even flew to St. Petersburg to get the season underway in March, but that weekend was quickly called off due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not long afterward the Indy Lights season was canceled altogether, leaving Kirkwood to search elsewhere for opportunities while he waited for an opportunity to cash in on his scholarship. Kirkwood briefly participated in the IndyCar iRacing Challenge, but ultimately found refuge in sports cars.
“It was definitely a strange year,” Kirkwood told Motorsports Beat. “We went in to St. Petersburg and ended up not even racing. It was kind of an eerie feeling.
“But fortunately I got a few rides with Lexus in their RC-F GT3 car with Vasser-Sullivan, was able to do the (Sebring 12 Hours) and (Petit Le Mans), as well as some LMP3 starts with 47 Motorsports where we won at Daytona and podiumed in a couple of other events.
“I definitely, wasn’t just sitting around. I was actually driving some stuff, so I was very fortunate to have those opportunities.
Some might have considered the time a setback given Kirkwood’s IndyCar prospects, but he considers it to have been a positive time for his career.
“I almost looked at it as somewhat of a blessing in disguise because if I was around Indy Lights last year, I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do the Lexus stuff and the LMP3 stuff. I was actually able to learn a lot with pit strategy and pitstops as a whole, tire saving, fuel saving in the GTD category. So it all worked out.”
With the return of Indy Lights in 2021 came a renewed opportunity for Kirkwood. He continued with defending champions Andretti Autosport, who had announced his addition to its Lights lineup prior to the pandemic and maintained his position through it.
That left Kirkwood positioned for success, but he tried to enter the season without heightened expectations. “I try and start every year with a, with a, with a level playing field and not try and expect anything,” he said. “Because if anything, that just puts pressure on yourself, especially if you consider the last four seasons that I’ve ran where I’ve won the championship. (I) try not to put any pressure on myself and go into it, knowing that we’ve got to work hard to get wins. That tends to work for me.”
The lowered expectations may have helped Kirkwood early on. In his usual fashion, he started off the year a bit slower than some might have expected, finishing ninth and fifth in the opening weekend at Barber Motorsports Park. Kirkwood scored two podiums including his first series victory the following weekend at St. Petersburg, but followed it up with a pair of quiet fourth-place finishes at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
This is nothing new for Kirkwood. He had hit or matched his worst finish of the season at each step of the Road to Indy ladder system on the opening weekend of the year before 2021. But he’d also always followed with a later stretch of dominance.
While the competitive level is higher, Indy Lights has proven no different so far. Kirkwood followed the Indy weekend with a sweep of the races at Detroit and a win in the opening race at Road America, bursting to the front of the Indy Lights standings. A 12th-place result dropped Kirkwood back to second, but he trails leader David Malukas by only eight points heading into the second half of the 2021 season.
“For some reason I always start off every year a little slow,” Kirkwood said. “That’s just typically how it’s been for me in USF2000 and Indy Pro and that trend kind of carried over into Indy Lights. … But we’ve progressed well. We’ve kind of gotten on a roll with Detroit and Road America, with three wins – and we probably should’ve got a fourth one on Sunday.
“We’re in the groove now.”
With half of the season’s race to go, Kirkwood finds himself as one of three standout competitors along with Malukas and fellow scholarship driver Linus Lundqvist. The trio are all separated by just eight points, with fourth-place Toby Sowery an additional 56 points back in fourth.
Each of the three have proven to be race winners and consistent contenders. Kirkwood believes finding victory lane the most of the three may be key to locking in the 2021 Indy Lights title.
Of course we want to be as consistent as possible and finish in the top three,” he said. “But ultimately, at the end of the day, if it’s just us three winning then it’s going to come down to who gets the most wins out of us. So that’s our goal at the moment.
“Winning races wins championships, I guess. So we need to get as many of those as we can.”
Luckily for Kirkwood, he knows a thing or two about winning at the next track. He’s undefeated at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in his Road to Indy career, having claimed three USF2000 races and a pair of Indy Pro 2000 events at the track.
Looking to the future, Kirkwood hopes to topple his rivals and claim his fifth-consecutive championship, continuing a trend that started in the F4 United States Championship and continued through F3 Americas, USF2000 and Indy Pro 2000.
The scholarship for the title winner plays a key role in his IndyCar plans, so Kirkwood is keeping his focus on succeeding in Indy Lights for the short-term future.
“That’s ultimately going to be the deciding factor in whether I go to IndyCar or not with the scholarship,” Kirkwood said. “So that’s our main focus at the moment.
“I’m sure there will be conversations in the next few months as things mix up, but at the moment I’m just fully focused on getting race wins.”
Catch up with the other Indy Lights scholarship drivers at the links below:
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