Detroit Indy Lights: Kirkwood beats Lundqvist for second win

From pole position, Kirkwood immediately got the jump on Linus Lundqvist of GRG with HMD Motorsports who had to protect himself from Toby Sowery in the Juncos Racing entry. Behind them, Alex Peroni of Carlin ran fourth ahead of David Malukas, who had done well to qualify fifth after a huge shunt in practice.

At the back, Antonio Serravalle and Christian Bogle made contact but got going again without the need for a caution flag.

Over the opening segment of this 25-lap race, Kirkwood led by around 1.5sec, with Lundqvist coming under pressure from Sowery. However, Sowery made a slight error on the eighth lap, he dropped one second and into the clutches of Peroni… who in turn was only 1sec ahead of Malukas.

Trying to separate Robert Megennis from seventh place, Benjamin Pedersen of GRG/HMD brushed a wall which dropped him to 11th field with five laps to go, but he continued despite running well off the pace, as he was still ahead of Serravalle and Bogle.

In the closing laps, Sowery – now 3.5sec behind Lundqvist – was facing a renewed attack from Peroni, while Megennis who, defending from Sting Ray Robb (Juncos) made contact that put Robb in the wall on the penultimate lap, and allowed Devlin DeFrancesco onto his teammate’s tail.

Lundqvist charged onto Kirkwood’s tail in the final lap but Kirkwood held firm to win by half a second, while Sowery staved off Peroni to claim the final podium position.