Bob Pockrass
FOX Motorsports Insider
DETROIT — Alex Palou 5, Kyle Kirkwood 2.
That’s the score when it comes to INDYCAR wins this year, with Kirkwood picking up his second victory of the season at the Detroit Grand Prix, where Palou got wrecked but didn’t seem to have the pace to match Kirkwood.
“I knew we were going to have a good points day — I wanted to keep it clean because of [Palou’s crash],” Kirkwood said. “But also, I was like, ‘I’ve got to win this race.’”
The Andretti driver has earned both of his wins on street courses (his first of the year came at Long Beach) and even with the victory and Palou’s 25th-place finish, Kirkwood still sits 102 points behind Palou in the standings, nearly a two-race gap with 10 races remaining in the season.
“That’s still a mile away, but it puts you back in a position where you feel like you might be able to get that back,” Kirkwood said.
“But I’m sure we’re going to go to road courses and Palou is going to do his thing. So we’ll see what happens.”
Takeaways from Detroit, which capped a five-week stretch where INDYCAR drivers were on-track every weekend:
All-American Podium
The podium (top-three) finishers were all born in the United States, a first for the INDYCAR series since Mid-Ohio in July 2020 when Colton Herta, Alexander Rossi and Ryan Hunter-Reay went 1-2-3 in an Andretti sweep.
Kirkwood and Herta (third) gave Andretti two of the spots, with A.J. Foty Racing’s Santino Ferrucci finishing second.
The Indianapolis 500 last week had 14 countries represented in the 33-car field. The full-time 27 drivers hail from 12 different countries: 11 drivers from the United States; three from New Zealand; two from Denmark and Sweden and England; and one from Mexico, Cayman Islands, Spain, Australia, Netherlands, Canada and Israel.
“We have one of the most diverse series in the world, I think, and it’s good to have the U.S. back on top,” Kirkwood said. “I’m not going to lie; that’s pretty cool, actually. I’m stoked with that.”
Herta said just the fact the series has such an international flavor is cool. As far as the all-U.S. podium?
“It doesn’t matter,” Herta said. “It’s cool, especially with a series that has become so international on the driver side, … getting walks of life in the series.
“It really just amps the competitiveness up and brings the best drivers.”
Kirkwood and Ferrucci have raced against each other since they were six years old.
“There’s a lot of really good, talented Americans in the sport, but a big part of the sport is having all these different drivers from different countries that make it so great, make it so talented, make the depth of the grid so powerful,” Ferrucci said.
“But it is really cool to be on the podium with two fellow race-car drivers that I grew up racing against from go-karts all the way to INDYCAR.”
Palou Wrecked By Malukas
Palou was knocked out of the race when he was sent into the wall by David Malukas, who hit Palou when going into a turn on a restart.
“I just ran out of talent,” Malukas said. “I feel so bad. I tried to slow it down and just locked up both front breaks. We were struggling so hard compared to other people, just to get tire temps, to get break temps [high enough]. … I just really messed that up so bad.”
Malukas was given a stop-and-go penalty for the contact, but that was little consolation to Palou.
“It just sucks when you get taken out when it’s early on and nothing that I could have done, in my opinion, so just a shame,” Palou said. “I haven’t seen the video yet.
“But he’s still out there, right? And I’m down here with a broken car. So not ideal.”
The No. 10 car of Alex Palou wasn’t able to finish Sunday’s race.
Malukas wasn’t the only driver to be penalized for avoidable contact. Scott McLaughlin was penalized early for getting into the back and turning Nolan Siegel.
“I went for the move,” McLaughlin said. “I feel like he moved on the brakes and then basically stopped. I was sort of really committed to the move, but ultimately I can see why [they penalized me].
“Normally, when the car makes contact from behind, you’re in trouble. But I feel like the kid was trying to move a little bit. It’s probably ambition on my part.”
That contact resulted in a little bit of a beef on X after Siegel’s boss, Arrow McLaren Racing team principal Tony Kanaan posted a replay of the accident with the comment “Oh.”
This followed:
Kirkwood Triumphs After Rough Weeks
Kirkwood’s win followed an emotional six days in which he thought he finished seventh in the Indianapolis 500 but then saw the finish stripped away and turned into a 32nd-place finish for failing postrace tech.
After a notable incident in practice where Will Power pushed and turned Kirkwood, he ended up third in qualifying.
“I’ve gotten every emotion that I’ve ever had in motorsports,” Kirkwood said. “We had a phenomenal 500, and I got every emotion in the 500 alone. … Obviously, drama through the week and then coming into this weekend where we knew we’d be fast.
“We were extremely fast, I kind of threw it away a little bit in qualifying, but then got some of that positivity back, or all of it I should say, back here today and put an exclamation point on everything that has happened.”
That in some ways is just the nature of the sport.
“That’s motor racing for you,” Kirkwood said. “You get all the emotions. You get the highs; you get the lows. That’s what we live for.
“We live for the highs, but we also enjoy the lows when you look back at it, because it makes the highs even that much sweeter.”
Kyle Kirkwood is all smiles after his victory in Detroit.
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and IndyCar for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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