For the sixth IndyCar race in a row, we can still say that there have been only two winners so far in 2025. That is because Andretti Global's Kyle Kirkwood emerged victorious in Sunday night's chaotic Bommarito Automotive Group 500 at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.
The win is Kirkwood's second in a row and third of the year, and he remains the only winner not named Alex Palou, the three-time and two-time reigning series champion who won five of the season's first six races, including the 109th running of the Indy 500.
Yet entering any given race weekend, Kirkwood is still rarely viewed as one of the top contenders. It's usually Palou, Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Scott Dixon, the Team Penske trio of Scott McLaughlin, Josef Newgarden, and Will Power, and Arrow McLaren's Pato O'Ward. Even Andretti Global's Colton Herta generally enters a race weekend with better odds than Kirkwood.
Entering the race at Gateway, Kirkwood was considered a street race specialist.
His first win of the year was his second win in Long Beach, and his second win of the year came in Detroit. He also won in Nashville in 2023, so the first four wins of his career were street course wins.
Now he is an oval race winner, and he won at a track that had been not only a Team Penske stronghold but a Chevrolet stronghold in recent years, holding off O'Ward and a surging Christian Rasmussen to secure the win.
One of the narratives about Kirkwood, and really Andretti in general, has been their lack of consistency. Looking at Kirkwood's two-win 2023 season, you can see why. His two wins were his only two top five finishes, and he didn't even finish in the top 10 in the standings.
Last year, he flipped the script on consistency, yet he didn't win. Aside from two DNFs, he finished outside of the top 10 just twice, and he scored a career-high seventh in the championship.
This year, he has put it all together, yet he still isn't truly viewed as a season-long title threat.
It's debatable, but it's understandable.
Had it not been for his de facto disqualification from the Indy 500, he would be 52 points behind Palou for the championship lead, and in second place in the standings. Instead, he is 75 back and in third. He originally finished that race in sixth, so his worst finish of the year through eight races would have been 11th, the best worst finish among anybody in the series.
The driver with the best worst finish has historically fared well in the championship, winning the majority of the series titles since 2018.
Yet Kirkwood is still lacking something, and while it may not matter (whether he wins the title or not this year), it was a statistic that particularly stood out when he was celebrating on the podium with O'Ward.
The podium finish was only the sixth of his career. It was O'Ward's 30th.
O'Ward has competed full-time for two years longer than Kirkwood, who debuted in 2022, so with seven O'Ward wins to Kirkwood's five, their win percentages are fairly similar. But as far as actually being a contender for race wins, somebody like O'Ward has been head and shoulders ahead of Kirkwood.
Even someone like McLaughlin, whose career win percentage (seven wins since his 2020 debut) is in the O'Ward/Kirkwood ballpark, has 20 podium finishes.
Herta has a lesser podium finish rate than McLaughlin, despite having two more wins, but even he has as many non-win podium finishes as he does wins, making him a contender on a far more regular basis than Kirkwood.
But when it comes to Kirkwood, when he isn't winning, he isn't at the front.
Yes, his consistency has taken a step forward. But of his 13 top 10 finishes last year, only five were in the top five, and of those, only one was on the podium. It was ironically a runner-up finish behind Herta, and yes, it came on a street course in Toronto.
So yes, he entered Gateway without a single career podium finish on an oval.
Of course, if you give a driver six podium finishes, I'm sure the driver would take five wins all day, every day. And if Kirkwood wins every remaining race on the schedule, regardless of track type, it would sort of be hard to knock him, wouldn't it? It has sure been hard to knock him after winning the two most recent races, that's for sure.
But the fact is he isn't going to win every remaining race. The question is this: is he good enough to be at least contending for wins on days he doesn't win?
Because those are the days that become difference-makers in a 17-race championship battle.
Kirkwood's six career podium finishes include five wins and a runner-up, which is ironically the statline of Palou's best six races of this year alone.
Can Kirkwood take that Palou-like next step and become a threat for the podium on days he isn't winning, and can he do it ASAP so that he can truly give the three-time champion a run for his money?
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