MPH: Herta's warning from broken Andretti F1 dream
F1
Colton Herta has left behind IndyCar security for the risks of F2, and while his talent is unquestioned, the real hope is that the decision is truly his own, Mark Hughes says
Colton Herta has turned his back on a successful and lucrative IndyCar career to commit to racing in F2 next year at 26 years old, four years after he was first scheduled to arrive in F1 (when he was linked with Sauber and Red Bull). This is off the back of his newly announced role as Cadillac F1’s reserve and test driver.
There is no commitment from the F1 team of a race seat (Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas are both contracted for 2026-27), and at the moment he does not have the requisite number of superlicence points to race in the category anyway. It’s a brave, sudden change of career trajectory for someone so well established in IndyCar.
“All I can do is really show gratitude to Cadillac F1 for giving me this opportunity to be a test driver for Formula 1 team, and an American Formula 1 team,” he says, “so it’s an exciting time. And for me, I’m just chomping at the bit. I think it’s a really cool, cool step for me, a cool opportunity, and one that I’m ready to get to work on.”
He’s quick, he was competitive with Lando Norris as a team-mate in Formula 4 many years ago before moving back to the US for the opportunities on offer there.
Herta in a nine-time winner in IndyCar
IndyCar
It’s a very different style of racing from the European scene, less intense, friendlier, with more of a travelling community feel. It’s difficult to say if there is the same depth of talent among the drivers, but there is a bigger spread of strength among the teams, not just in IndyCar but in the supporting series. It’s a more freewheeling scene.
So even though he’s a talented guy, Herta is coming into an alien environment at a high level (F2), without experience of many/most of the tracks, already six-seven years older than many of the quick guys who already know the territory. He’s entering a category of racing with severe testing restrictions and limited tyre sets, making it nigh-on impossible to experiment through the practices as a way of speeding up the learning process. Every one of those F2 drivers will be intimately familiar with the tyre challenges, as they are the same as they will have encountered in F3.
He’ll be doing this while learning all about the simulator world of F1 and the myriad of systems of the new Formula 1 with its active aero and unusual power unit energy splits. He’s coming from a type of car which responds to being taken by the scruff of the neck and submitting to the driver’s will to a much more sophisticated one in which maintaining momentum while taking the minimum from the tyres is what determines who is quick and who is not.
Bryan and Colton Herta
IndyCar
This is not a casual undertaking. Levels of driver fitness are extraordinarily high, and you can usually just look at a European racer and, without knowing his identity, you’d know he was an athlete of some sort. That’s much less obviously the case with many US drivers.
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By
Dominic Tobin
Colton seems to have a nice life there, well-paid, highly respected, a drummer in the band he founded with his school friends. What’s not to like? He’s committing to a much more ascetic way of life at a relatively late age after becoming established as a megastar in his own environment. This isn’t Jacques Villeneuve or Juan Pablo Montoya making the switch to a top F1 team with thousands of miles of preparation. It’s almost like starting over.
Even the idea of Herta’s friend, the multiple IndyCar champ Alex Palou, joining the F1 grid with Red Bull (as was falsely rumoured a couple of weeks ago) would have been a significantly easier switch than this.
He’s saying all the right things about the move and if he really is as good as some believe, he will overcome these challenges. But the worrying bit of history here is Michael Andretti, who never gave the impression of really wanting to do F1 when he arrived here in ’93. It was much more the dream of his father Mario (who’d made the transition brilliantly well in an earlier era). It didn’t work, and Michael was back in IndyCar a year later.
Colton’s father Bryan was a very high-calibre racer himself, super-serious in his approach – and flirted with F1. It never quite happened here for him. One would hope this current dream of F1 is Colton’s more than Bryan’s.
