Kyle Kirkwood turned a two-lap average of 196.852 mph at Nashville Superspeedway on Saturday, good for pole position and the only lap in the 197-mph bracket across all 25 NTT INDYCAR SERIES entrants. The #27 Andretti Global Honda starts Sunday’s Borchetta Bourbon Music City Grand Prix from the front row. The championship standings get a little tighter as a result.
Kirkwood has been one of the more consistent drivers in the series this season, finishing in the top 10 in 10 of his 11 races. His one win came at the inaugural Java House Grand Prix of Arlington earlier this year. Saturday’s pole point trims, by a single point, the 56-point gap that Alex Palou carries into the weekend. It is a small bite out of a large cushion, but pole points have a way of mattering when a championship is decided by fewer than 56 points at the end of October.
For Kirkwood, the moment came with some visible relief. “I feel like I’ve been giving pole positions away all year long,” he said after qualifying. “So, I’m thrilled to get one in the books this year.” The confidence in the Honda package was equally apparent: “That Honda power basically forced me to get a pole out there, our car was so strong.”
Palou will roll off fourth in his #10 Chip Ganassi Racing Honda. The Spaniard has four wins in 2026 and is hunting his first oval victory of the season. Sunday’s race on the concrete Nashville oval, however, will wait until after Spain plays in the World Cup final. Fox’s coverage is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. CT, following the conclusion of that match, with a delayed green flag if the final goes to extra time. Palou acknowledged the qualifying session was good but not perfect: “Our car was good, it was really fast, I just didn’t have the absolutely perfect qualifying run.”
Palou’s Chip Ganassi Racing teammate Scott Dixon qualified fifth in the #9 Honda. Dixon has not visited victory lane in 2026, putting at risk his streak of consecutive NTT INDYCAR SERIES seasons with at least one win, a run he is trying to extend to 22. A concrete oval at Nashville, where the series has not raced since 2008, is unusual territory for most of the field. Dixon, along with Will Power and Graham Rahal, is among the handful of drivers who previously competed at the facility. That institutional knowledge did not fully translate into qualifying pace on Saturday, but race-day strategy on an unfamiliar surface can be a different conversation.
The Honda contingent filled out the top 10 further with both Marcus Armstrong (Meyer Shank Racing, eighth) and Marcus Ericsson (Andretti Global, tenth) cracking the top 10. Power, running the #14 Andretti Global Honda, qualified 14th. Rookies Mick Schumacher (16th) and Dennis Hauger (23rd) also competed under the Honda banner, as did veterans Felix Rosenqvist (17th), Kyffin Simpson (18th), Louis Foster (20th), Romain Grosjean (22nd), and Graham Rahal (25th).
Kirkwood starts from a position he has not occupied often this season. Whether he can convert it into his second win of 2026 matters not just for the trophy case but for a championship race that, with six rounds remaining after Nashville, is not yet decided. Palou’s four-win season has built a comfortable margin, but 56 points on an oval is not a lead that survives a bad afternoon.
Source: Honda. Images courtesy of Honda.
