Kyle Kirkwood was just .1470-seconds from behind quickest on the day on Friday from Portland. The second-year driver turned in a lap of 58.3246-seconds in his No. 27 Dallara-Honda which was good enough to chime in as P2 on the 27 car speed chart from the 75-minute long NTT INDYCAR SERIES practice session on the Pacific Northwest road course.

“Yeah. I mean, quite happy,” Kirkwood said after a strong showing on Friday.

In saying that, he also cautions on how much his respective time on the speed charts in comparison to the others were due to putting on the Firestone alternate tires sooner. As a result of doing so, he had a clean lap around the 12-turn, 1.964-mile track.

With 27 cars and less than 2 miles of real estate to work with, as more and more cars put on the faster red sidewalled tires, it created traffic jams which proved harder to push as fast as you could go.

Kirkwood didn’t have that problem eon his lap.

“It seemed like me and Lundgaard were one of the ones to go kind of early on red tires there,” Kirkwood said. “That probably benefited us because we didn’t get trafficked. It looked like a bit of a traffic jam out there towards the end of the session.”

In saying that, this is a track that with more and more laps turned on it, the track gets quicker too. So maybe in all, it balances out.

“Granted, the track does get a little faster as the run goes on,” Kirkwood continued. “I was happy to get out early and get our lap in.

“We are happy with the car. We were a little bit different than our teammates, and I imagine because of that, you’ll see my teammates take a step tomorrow.”

Plus, it’s not like Kirkwood hasn’t not only been good here in the past, but these natural terrain tracks suit him as well.

The Andretti Autosport driver finished 13th last year and also won 5 of his 6 Road to Indy starts (2nd in the other) here. Kirkwood has also finished 12th, 14th, 9th, 17th and 9th on natural road courses in 2023. He spun while battling for third in Mid-Ohio and was punted while starting up front in Road America, so those finishes could in theory be better.

“Yeah, I mean, some of it,” Kirkwood said on if he can carry anything over from his Road to Indy dominance here. “Obviously I can take a lot more from last year driving with AJ Foyt Racing. It was one of our better weekends, to be honest.

“Some of these high-speed, flowy tracks tend to suit me. So if there was two categories of tracks that I think that I thrive on, it’s street courses and then high-speed, flowy tracks.

“So Here, Mid-Ohio, Laguna tend to be tracks that suit me best. Yeah, I mean, I kind of came into this weekend pretty excited, hopeful that we would be fast. Being P-2 isn’t too bad for practice one, you know. Yeah, so hopefully we just continue that trend.

“Yeah, there’s definitely stuff that I learned from my junior categories that I’m carrying on to now. I think that proved last year when I came out of the junior formulas and then went into INDYCAR here for the first time and was quick pretty much right out of the box. Almost transferred into the top 12 in qualifying.”