  We study preheating via kinetic couplings after dilaton-axion
$\alpha$-attractor inflation. We focus on E-model $\alpha$-attractor driven
inflation where the inflaton is kinetically coupled to an ultralight axion. In
this class of models, the kinetic coupling is related to the form of the
potential, and once the amplitude of the scalar curvature spectrum as well as
the tensor-to-scalar ratio are specified, the model has no free parameters. We
find that kinetic preheating can be extremely efficient, with stronger
preheating occurring at parameter values corresponding to smaller values of the
tensor-to-scalar ratio. Preheating becomes extremely efficient below $r
\lesssim 1.6\times 10^{-5}$.
