Kirkwood's Long Beach triumph adds to 'huge' weekend for Wickens

Kyle Kirkwood had many reasons to smile on Sunday after winning the 50th Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. Among the highlights for the Floridian was earning his first with Robert Wickens – his driving advisor and performance analyst – on the timing stand.

Prior to Sunday’s victory with the No. 27 Andretti Global Honda, Wickens made his long-awaited return to top level motorsport on Saturday when he made his first start in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship driving the No. 36 DXDT Corvette Z06 GT3.

It was an unforgettable weekend for Kirkwood, who took pole, led the most laps, and dominated on his way to victory, and for Wickens, who was fast in his hand-control Corvette and ran well in the 100-minute race with teammate Tommy Milner.

Running inside the top five, contact during Milner’s closing stint ended their strong run, but overall, it was a big weekend of achievement for the Canadian. And on Sunday, Wickens wheeled himself to victory lane and joined in Andretti’s IndyCar celebrations, which Kirkwood cherished.

“It was a huge, huge weekend for him in general,” Kirkwood told RACER. “So great to see him back in a car, top-tier motorsports in IMSA, something that is absolutely taken off in recent years. It was really cool to see that, and to cap it off for him, to get out of the car doing his own race, then come back to help us and roll out of here with a win… He’s a big part of our team, and things are looking up for Robert Wickens.”

Kirkwood says Wickens’ keen eye as a former IndyCar driver and lifelong racer has been invaluable this season.

“He picks out the things that we might not see,” the 26-year-old said. “You know, the typical thing for a driver is, you get out, you look at some video, and some data to compare to your teammates, right? And that’s about all the time you get. You’re stuck in media, you’re with sponsors, you’re doing a bunch of other things, and you’re just running around, right? So you don’t get a whole lot of time to do other things.

“Robert’s there to as a driver to dig into some things, and knows exactly what to look for, and pull a few things that we might not see outside of what we’re already looking at, and give us some input. He’s been a big help when it comes to that. He sits down for hours and looks at video, data from other cars as well, back through the broadcast, and comes up with some pretty cool, neat stuff and new ideas too, just based on what comes to mind.

“And it’s good having a guy like him, because engineers do a good job picking out things, but not not every time. Does it correlate with what exactly the driver sees? So it’s good having Robert on board.”

When he isn’t winning for Andretti, Kirkwood is a regular presence in IMSA at the longer races with the Vasser Sullivan Lexus team which goes head-to-head with Wickens’ DXDT squad. Wickens is starting off with the five shorter races in 2025, but he could be supporting Kirkwood on the IndyCar timing stand one weekend and battling for IMSA glory in the same GT class the next if he’s able to add some of the enduros into his 2026 schedule.

“It’s really, really cool to see, and hopefully gets more opportunities,” Kirkwood said. “You know, we want to watch him winning races…maybe not against us at Lexus, but if it’s not us, we want to see him win a lot more races.”