Honda sweeps IndyCar's street circuits: 'It's just a lot of hard work'

With Andretti Global’s Kyle Kirkwood winning the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, IndyCar’s final street race in 2026, there was one common denominator in all six street races: They were won by a car with a Honda engine.

Honda went 6-of-6 on the street circuits (two Kirkwood wins, three Alex Palou wins and one from Marcus Ericsson) while Chevrolet, IndyCar’s other engine manufacturer, didn’t win any.

To sweep the streets, Honda never really had to scrape by in any race, as a Honda engine led 542 of the 597 (90.7%) of the laps on streets this year while claiming 15 of the 18 podium spots. The manufacturer has won 19 of the last 21 street races dating back to 2023, when it also swept the streets.

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Honda has won 10 of the 15 races, including Felix Rosenqvist’s win in the Indianapolis 500 for Meyer Shank Racing. After Chevrolet closed the gap with three straight wins in June and July, Honda has separated itself by winning four in a row.

“I think the fact that we won the 500 and we also turn around and we’re doing it currently on street courses, it makes me proud for the team,” Honda Racing Corporation USA vice president Kelvin Fu told IndyStar. “And a lot of it is, it’s just not us, it’s Andretti and it’s (Chip Ganassi Racing), right? It’s a combination of their ability to develop their car control and the drivers and surviving a 147-lap, bumpy street course.”

This season’s schedule called for three of the six street courses to be circuits IndyCar had never visited before. Andretti Global captured all three, with Kirkwood winning the Grand Prix of Arlington and Freedom 250 Grand Prix while Ericsson won the Ontario Honda Dealers Indy at Markham. Not only did a Honda engine win all three races, but the pole was won by a Honda in each of those races, which weren’t won by the pole-sitter.

“You’re always trying to work with the teams on how they’re going to deal with these different situations,” Fu said of tweaking engines and preparing course simulators for new tracks. “It’s just a lot of hard work between what our engineers do here at the factory. (The engineers) pass it to the trackside group, and the trackside group were posted with each team to do the best we can and make the engine perform for the team.”

The last two weekends in Markham, Ontario, and Washington, D.C., have been two-day weekends for teams as opposed to the three-day events that street and road course races typically are. While the Freedom 250 Grand Prix was always supposed to be two days of on-track action, IndyCar’s postponement of Friday activities in Markham gave teams and engine manufacturers an unexpected obstacle.

At both races, Honda managed to make the necessary alterations for teams to succeed.

“It forces our engineers to be really flexible,” Fu said of the short weekends. “Because you’ve got the two weeks of Indy for the 500 – which is just like hours of running every day, lots of debriefs – you have time to kind of think things through.

“And then suddenly you’ve got weekends like Markham and D.C. race where it’s like two days, you’ve got to figure it out fast and on the fly. And it forces our engineers to be creative, and they have to really understand what the engine does, what the teams need and be really in tune with what the whole team is going to need going forward.”

Honda now leads IndyCar’s engine manufacturer championship 1,316-1,110. After Chevrolet won three straight engine manufacturer championships from 2022 to 2024, Honda is in position to win a second in a row thanks to a season that has seen it pull off five podium sweeps while Chevrolet has none.

Following the 2024 season, Fu, HRC USA president David Salters and the entirety of HRC worked to enhance Honda’s engine efficiency to reclaim the championship that it won four times in a row before Chevrolet’s three-peat.

“We had to look internally and understand what we need to do to up our game,” Fu said. “And I’m immensely proud of what the whole team did at HRC to get both engine performance, but also engine reliability.”

Honda will look to close out the championship with three races to go, while Palou and Kirkwood are the two leaders for the driver championship. Honda is the frontrunner for the engine manufacturer championship thanks to its domination on the streets in 2026.

Zion Brown is IndyStar’s motorsports reporter. Follow him at@z10nbr0wn. Get IndyStar’s motor sports coverage sent directly to your inbox with our Motor Sports newsletter. Subscribe to theYouTube channel IndyStar TV: IndyCar for a behind-the-scenes look at IndyCar and expert analysis.