BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — There exists a joke in the NASCAR world that if you want to end a drought, bring NASCAR to town. Except in this case, INDYCAR brings the rain.
The INDYCAR circus rolls into Barber Motorsports Park for race No. 4 of the 2025 NTT INDYCAR Series season. Saturday, however, calls for storms. Barring potential thunderstorms, bet on wet weather qualifying. Kyle Kirkwood sees it as an equalizer.
“We’ve been good in the wet in recent years,” he said. “So it wouldn’t be a negative for us, I would say. But it always just starts to curve ball at everybody.”
Wet weather makes mistakes easier and ups the chance of winding up at the back of the field.
“So I think, as every driver would probably say, they prefer that it doesn’t end up being wet, because it’s a lot more on the driver than it is the car when that comes around,” he said.
Compounding the matter, teams have to plan around both wet weather in qualifying and setting up their cars for a dry race, Sunday. Which calls for chamber of commerce weather, according to AccuWeather.
Regardless, Kirkwood and his team are “gonna roll with the punches” and deal with “whatever God gives us, tomorrow.”
“We’re gonna swing with it,” he said. “So yeah, it’s looking dry for Sunday, though, so we got to be ready for a dry race at least. So setting up the car today, hopefully in some dry conditions and getting through the practices and warm up, at least in dry conditions, will be important.”
The skies over Barber Motorsports Park remained mostly cloudy with no rain for practice time at 2:30 p.m. CT.
