Kyle Kirkwood, Andretti Global’s defending race — and pole — winner at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, gives RACER the inside line on how to lap the 11-turn, 1.968-mile street course in an NTT IndyCar Series race car.
“Qualifying is going to feel different this weekend because for the last two years we’ve had only one lap to get the job done in each segment; the tires would start going off after just a single lap. This year, we’re going to be using the same Firestone compound we used at St. Petersburg, and we’ve discovered that although maybe the peak isn’t so high, you should be able to get two laps out of it, maybe even three.
“Setting up properly for your exit to Turn 11 can gain you a fraction of time because it pays off all down that front straight, and even if it’s only half a tenth, that can make a difference because we’re talking about a 66- or 67-second lap and we’re all so close together in terms of speed.
“On race day, you can obviously find even more speed down the front straight if you get a tow, and I believe that the fact that Shoreline Drive is curved actually increases the tow effect. Rather than getting a tow just due to drag reduction, you’re getting a tow due to downforce loss because you’re taking load off the tires as well as drag off the car. So, it’s a genuinely strong place to get a tow, which makes Turn 1 (BELOW) a good potential passing zone. At least, early in the race, before the inside line is covered in marbles. There is an insane amount of rubber down the left side of the track by the end of the race.
“If you’re running alone, coming into the brake zone for Turn 1, you want to be over to your right, so you can make the angle through there as shallow as possible and keep up your minimum speed. Then it’s hard on the gas through to the fountain roundabout, and because you’ve got that point in the left wall that kicks out, you have no way to set up for the roundabout. And then how you tackle that right-hander is super-dependent on what your car is allowing you to do. If you have understeer, you’ll use the curb at the fountain to help rotate the car, but if you have oversteer, you wouldn’t touch it. It’s something that changes throughout the race, because as more rubber builds up on it, people use it more because you pick up more grip.
“Then the exit is one of the easiest turns to make a big mistake — especially early in the weekend before there’s much rubber down — because again, the wall on the left sticks out. You can’t get hard on the throttle until the car settles after the roundabout curb, because if you have understeer and you get too hard on the throttle, you’re going to hit that angled point with your front, and if you have oversteer, the rear is going to hit it. Again, you can get on the gas sooner as the weekend goes on.
“Turn 4 is a fairly easy corner because the exit bends outward, which is a bit of an anomaly on this circuit, in that it’s working with you and you can carry more speed than you expected through there, and it allows you to set up for Turn 5, which is another right-hander. It looks like there’s a short straight between 4 and 5, but you’re never actually going straight because you’re treating it like the entry and exit of one long 180-degree turn. How much curb gets used seems to vary from driver to driver: you see quite a few different lines through there, and I think because of that, it feels like you never get it perfect; it feels awkward.
“Then from the apex of Turn 5 to the exit, there are a lot of bumps and that makes it one of the toughest corners on the track, because the car’s not settling and you need to get hard on the throttle for that short straight up to Turn 6. If you see crashes there, it’s almost always because the driver’s gone back to full power too soon before the car’s stopped dealing with that rough surface. Luckily at Andretti Global, we’ve been very strong on mechanical grip, but that corner is never going to be straightforward for anybody.
“Up to the left-hand Turn 6 is fairly simple, but you want to be moving diagonally over to the right before cutting into the apex for the left-hander, which is a struggle because there are bumps on turn-in. But then from the apex the car settles again because they’ve changed the track surface here and repaved down the hill to Turn 8 — I recall it felt extremely bumpy in 2022, and last year felt a lot smoother. With that new pavement came a lot of grip, so now you can really lean hard from the exit so it’s easy to swing over to the left for the right-hand Turn 8. What they call Turn 7 isn’t a corner at all, it’s just a slight kink in the wall coming back at you, but it’s about there that you can finally focus on the entry to Turn 8. Before that you can’t see it because Turn 6 is almost like a small crest and then the road [Pine Avenue] falls away and we’re sitting so low.
“Now again, you swing over to the left to straighten out the right-hand entry to Turn 8 onto the back straight because you want to take huge momentum there. But in the race, if someone is ahead of you, the width of the corner entry and the line that a driver naturally takes for the corner will leave a big gap up the inside. So it’s very tempting to dive for that gap, and especially now that there’s more grip to get the car slowed and turned in.
“There are two problems with that. One is that the track dramatically narrows from the center of the corner off, so the guy you’ve dive-bombed has to concede the corner pretty much straight away or you’re going to collide and at least one of you is going into the wall — like what we saw between Pato [O’Ward] and [Scott] Dixon last year (BELOW). Secondly, that compromised narrow line you’ve taken through 8 absolutely kills your speed onto the straight, so the car you’ve just passed has a good opportunity to re-pass you into Turn 9.
“That’s the 90-degree right at the end of the back straight and it’s where you can see a lot of passing maneuvers, but you’ve got to really be confident because the bump on the inside line is brutal. It can make the car go so light that you lock your tires and go straight into the runoff, or miss the apex so bad that you hit the wall at the exit of the turn. Making passes happen there will have you holding your breath because you might not know how your car is going to react until you’re in that moment: all through practice and qualifying, you’ve been specifically avoiding that bump because it’s not on the racing line, just the passing line.
“At Turn 10, you’ll see a variety of lines through practice and qualifying, but by the end of the race there are a lot of marbles so we generally all end up taking the same route through there. The hard thing is the compromise at 10, where you’re carrying a lot of momentum through this long left-hander, but not drifting too far from the curbing mid-corner because you’ve then got to then ace your line into the Turn 11 hairpin, which of course is a right-hander. The problem I’ve found is that at 10, the track is more exposed than you think, so the car can be really affected by wind. If it’s in your face, no problem, that keeps the nose pinned to the line you want to take through there, but if it’s a tailwind, it’s going to be pushing you away from the apex so that makes it much harder to go back to the left for turn-in at the hairpin.
“As we’ve seen, the hairpin is another really inviting corner to try and make a pass, because it’s very slow, and the line everyone takes for maximum momentum onto the front straight leaves a hole up the inside. That’s why you see crazy dive-bomb moves there at the start, because the field’s all bunched together and when IndyCar drops the green, some cars are just coming through the hairpin. Up to now, we’ve been allowed to pass from the moment they hear the green called, but I hope IndyCar is going to alter that for this race, so no one tries to pass going into 11 at the end of that final pace lap. It doesn’t usually work and it can cause a pile-up.
“So that’s a lap of Long Beach. It’s the track where I got my first IndyCar win, so it’s always going to be special for me personally, but it’s also such an iconic event — and I honestly think it’s a great track, too.”
