Colton Herta says outright speed is the main reason he could be a decent Formula 1 driver.
IndyCar frontrunner Herta switched to F2 this season with a Cadillac seat on the horizon, having been hired by F1’s newest team as a test and development driver.
Cadillac F1 CEO Dan Towriss made it clear that Herta had to “earn” the potential seat, setting a top 10 in this year’s F2 standings as a target; the American driver will also be expected to develop as hoped, and perform on the team’s simulator and in FP1 sessions – the first of which will come at Barcelona.
Convincing the squad to give him a chance will still be a tall order, with the current lineup comprising veteran grand prix winners Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas, but Herta reckons he has a key quality.
Asked by Motorsport in an exclusive interview what he would describe as the main reasons he should get an F1 seat, should he make his case with a PowerPoint presentation a la George Russell, Herta pondered: “It’s probably just down to outright speed, right? That’s the most important thing, that’s what you get hired on, and then the rest follows.
“If you look at what I was able to do in IndyCar – speed-wise and poles and whatnot – I think the one-lap pace is probably one of my specialties. But overall, you need to have everything, right?”
Herta set no fewer than 16 poles in IndyCar – more than anyone but veterans Will Power, Scott Dixon and Josef Newgarden among the series’ current crop. Interestingly, 15 of these came on road courses, which are more relevant to European-style racing than ovals.
Colton Herta, Andretti Global
Photo by: Penske Entertainment
But the Hitech driver still endured a difficult F2 debut in Melbourne, crashing eight laps into the only practice session and qualifying down in 14th; he raced to seventh in the feature race, thus opening his account for the season.
“There were some good parts about it that were good to hold on to, but there were a lot of bad parts,” Herta admitted about his maiden F2 weekend. “I had the crash in practice, which just put our whole weekend a step behind everybody else, not only because I had never been to the track and [was] driving the car for the first time on a race weekend, but there’s just so much that I had to keep up on. When you have a few less laps and you cut practice in half for yourself, it makes it impossible.
“I was happy that we progressed in every race to move forward. I think the race pace was very solid, actually. But qualifying is so important, and you need to qualify in the top 10 to get into that reverse grid where you can score points in both races. It’s very important to be able to do that. And I just hurt myself too much, to the point where we were going into qualifying and were just too far behind.
“It was disappointing from my perspective, but I think there was plenty of learning to be had. We weren’t expecting to just go out there and win anyways for our first weekend. But I was unsatisfied, for sure.”
Given the learning curve he has been facing, especially with unfamiliar Pirelli rubber, Herta will be keen to improve in the remaining 13 rounds of the campaign – with the next two unexpectedly taking place in North America, alongside F1 in Miami and Montreal, following the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi grands prix. The Canadian round clashes with the Indy 500, which he had hoped to take part in but will now be unable to.
Read our full interview with Colton Herta in the June issue of Autosport magazine, out on 7 May.
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