The Indy Lights champion ran 75 laps of the Sebring Raceway’s 1.7-mile short course on Tuesday and ended the session content that the team is making strong progress in terms of dampers for street courses, and that Chevrolet, too, is making strides in driveability.
This was Kirkwood’s first test with the Foyt-Chevy combo, having run his first three IndyCar tests with Andretti Autosport-Honda at Sebring, Barber Motorsports Park and Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course. He replaces Sebastien Bourdais in the #14 car which will again be ROKiT-sponsored, as will the car of one of his teammates, Tatiana Calderon who was also in action at Sebring.
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He told Motorsport.com, “I think it’s a common trend with a lot of drivers who have been in the series for some time that they’re not comfortable with the car being somewhat loose. And our car started out loose and we migrated away from that, but for the high-speed stuff I was able to drive the car a little bit looser than Sebastien drove in the past – which equates to some lap time.
“We also found some time with the dampers. The test program on Tatiana’s car and my car were fairly split up, I think, but I believe we ran the same dampers that the team’s been developing for some time, and we both liked them quite a lot. We were able to find good overall grip which equates to a good chunk of time on a bumpy track.”
Kirkwood admitted his test session wasn’t totally incident-free, however.
“I had initially been running in a lower power engine map, the kind you use to save fuel,” said the 23-year-old from Jupiter, FL, “and as soon as I went to full power on Lap 3, I spun. The way the power delivery is with the Chevy, it caught me off guard the very first time I went to full throttle. People warned me – Larry [Foyt, team president] told me, one of the Chevy guys said something to me about it. But I thought, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be fine’. Driving the Indy Lights car which is the most happy car in the world and moving to a Honda IndyCar with Andretti, I thought ‘This thing’s a breeze on throttle.’ But the way the Chevy delivers its power at the lower end [of the rev range] certainly caught me off guard.
“But at the end of the day, the engines felt the same. We played with a lot of different maps and torque curves. And that was a big part of our day, too – helping out Chevrolet with some of the fuel economy issues and fixing some of their torque curves. And I think we got it in a pretty good window, although it still needs to be tweaked a little bit.
“Mostly what we were doing was stuff Chevy can do at the track; it wasn’t anything they can run on the dyno and figure out and then apply it. It was like, this is what we need, let’s play around with this. They had a starting setup for us to go after and then we tweaked off of that.”
AJ Foyt Racing has not yet settled on an engineering line-up, but the team’s technical director Mike Colliver ran Kirkwood in the test, while Dalton Kellett’s race engineer Mike Pawlowski ran the #11 car for Calderon.
Said Kirkwood: “I get the feeling that Mike [Colliver] will be staying with me. I hope so; he’s very smart and we seem to have good chemistry.”
Kirkwood has now traveled three hours north to Daytona for the Roar Before the 24, as he prepares to tackle the Rolex 24 again from the seat of the #14 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F, which he’ll share with full-timers Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship’s new GTD Pro class.
