Kirkwood, who won at street tracks at Long Beach and Nashville last year, failed to progress from the first stage of qualifying and blamed a strategy call for pushing too late on the alternate compound Firestone tires, having missed the sweet spot of the rubber.
His team-mates Colton Herta and Marcus Ericsson both made the Fast Six and will start fourth and sixth.
“Honestly, we were just out of synch on laps for some reason,” Kirkwood told NBC Peacock. “We thought it [the fastest time] was going to be lap three or lap four and it was 100% lap two.
“So, I didn’t even put together a good lap because of that. I don’t know if we would’ve matched Colton there on his primary tire run [who was fastest in the same Q1 session], but we would at least have transferred into it.
“Disappointed with that, it was just kind of misjudged it across the entire team. We did have a car to transfer, I think we were definitely Fast-Six capable.
“It feels tighter than it’s ever been. And if you make a small mistake like that, not understanding whether to go lap two or lap three, it puts you out of the top six in the group, so it’s unfortunate.”
Kirkwood believes that race strategy will be crucial in Sunday’s race, and that his lowly starting spot – with an extra sets of fresh alternate tires available to him after he failed to progress to Q2 – can lead to a charge towards the front.
“You gotta push,” he added. “Who knows what it’s going to be tomorrow, is it two stop or three stop? That’s always the question here.
“Obviously last year’s start was hectic, a lot of yellows, so we’ll play it by ear and come up with a plan to formulate. We’ll have to dig through the field from 18th.
“I’m confident in our guys, we’ll get great pitstops and the car is fast and I think this track suits us.”
