Kyle Kirkwood helped kick off the track build ceremony for the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg this morning. I had an opportunity to chat with him afterwards. Look for some notes about today’s event in a later story.

Kyle Kirkwood believes he and his Andretti teammates will have an even better season in 2025 than they had in 2024, when they had many top 10 and top five finishes, but onlt two wins and a couple of poles to show for it.

The Jupiter, Florida native is always excited to race at St. Pete. His two IndyCar victories have come on street courses, and he would love to add his home race to that total.

On his 2024 season, Kirkwood said, “I think we took a step in the right direction. We just didn’t have the elusive wins and podiums that we needed. But I’d have to say we gave ourselves really good opportunities to have wins. We gave ourselves four or five good opportunities to win races, and none of them panned out for us. So we just got to keep doing it, keep digging, and hopefully this year will be even better than it was last year.”

His optimism stems from the addition of the crew that worked on the Myere Shank teams last year, who are now exclusively with Andretti Global.

“This year is different for Andretti, and it’s a little bit of the C suite change. I just hs pumped everyone up. We have an influx of engineers with Shank going away, they’re now in house. They’re helping us with other projects, and the crew is gelling together. Well, we’re putting a huge effort in. So only good things to come,” Kirkwood said.

On the hybrid at the Indianapolis 500, Kirkwood thinks it is too early to tell how it will affect things, but he doesn’t look for a significant difference.

“I would say, it’s not going to change the racing. You know, I don’t think people want the racing to change, right? I think it’s been phenomenal there. So that’s a positive thing to say, ” he said.

“But ultimately it is adding weight to the car, which is the negative, so hopefully the positives outweigh the negatives with that. So yeah, I mean, we’re looking forward to it. It’ll be a new challenge, hopefully a new thing that we can get ahead on.”

IndyCar introduced the hybrid energy recovery system mind season in 2024. Of the tracks that will se the ERS used for the first time in 2025, Kirkwood cited two where he believes it will be most effective.

“Thermal will be extremely effective. We didn’t have we didn’t have it at Road America (last year), yeah, it’ll be very effective there. We’re going to get a huge influx of power for a period of time on that on that track, because how long it is, so how you use it, how you manage it, and what time gain you have from it will be, will be important.”