Colton Herta, one of America’s brightest racing talents and a star of IndyCar, is making a bet on his own talent that few drivers ever have: he’s going backward in a bid to move forward by racing in Formula 1‘s primary feeder series in 2026.
Joining the Formula 2 grid at the age of 25 (he will turn 26 after the season’s first race) with the Hitech team is an unprecedented and deeply risky step in the world of modern motor racing. The challenge will be huge: after years on the ladder that led up to IndyCar, it’s back to school. F2 features circuits he has never raced on before, Pirelli tires that are incredibly complicated and frustrating for drivers to understand, against a field of young talents who have been racing and acclimating to those conditions for years.
The expectations will be huge — unrealistic, perhaps, given the scale of the challenge — and to many in the F1 paddock it is a boom-or-bust decision. The optics of Herta struggling in a field of drivers significantly younger would be difficult to manage, and F2 is a series known for how hard it is for drivers to stay consistent throughout a season: Oliver Bearman and Kimi Antonelli were shining examples of that in 2024.
Herta, who already has a foot in the F1 door as test driver of the incoming Cadillac team, has no illusions about the task at hand.
“I look at it as this is probably my last shot at Formula 1, given my age and everything considered,” he told ESPN about the move. “For sure, it’s untried and untested and it’ll be a lot of new stuff for me, something new to work on and learn. I’m excited.”
The backing of Cadillac and its F1 team boss Graeme Lowdon was key in the decision. The incoming American outfit is now just months away from its debut at the 2026 Australian Grand Prix, and while it did not fulfill the early wish of entering the sport with an American driver in one of its two seats, opting instead for the experience of race winners Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez, Herta’s prominent role within the team — which will include a test program and at least one Friday practice session at a grand prix — can leave little doubt what the company’s long-term plans for him are.
Nevertheless, he was not fully sold on the F2 idea when first pitched.
“I think the good thing is Graeme’s a very convincing person,” Herta joked about what made him decide on the F2 route. “Graeme mentioned it last year about halfway through the IndyCar season. We started looking into it and kind of the positives and negatives of it, and I think the positives kind of quite heavily outweighed the negatives of it. I think it’s going to be cool.
“It’s an important step for me. I think it’s a great opportunity for me to learn cars, tires, track, etc., and really kind of put me on the front foot for whenever I do get a chance in Formula 1 to be able to be successful.”
With Cadillac making it clear it was their preferred option to make him F1 ready, it became a no-brainer, regardless of what the outside noise might be.
“I think [Lowdon] and a few other people behind the scenes kind of made it an easy decision,” Herta said. “They laid it out. They said, ‘Look, this is what we want to do.’ I mean, there’s nothing really out there that, like, ‘Oh, I need to do this, I need to do that.’
“The most important thing is to learn, right? Just kind of understand what’s going on, and that’s kind of been what’s been told to me from the Formula 1 side of the team is really, in order for me to really help as my job as a test driver for the team, it would be to understand the tracks, understand the tires. And this is a great opportunity for me to do that.”
Herta downplayed the suggestion that the pressure is on to be competitive and a title contender from the beginning.
“It’s a tough championship,” he said. “It’s extremely good teams, very smart engineers. They’ve all been doing it for a long time.
“And, obviously, the drivers you see … basically any of the top five guys are always F1 ready. And whenever they do make that step up, they’re quite quickly on the pace, right? So they’re pretty much fully developed at that point as far as the major things and the race craft and the overall speed and the knowledge of how to drive a race car is already there.
“So it seems like a very competitive and professional championship, but we’re also competitors, right? Like, we want to win races … That’s still ultimately the goal.”
Herta’s move to F2 is borne out of two different quirks of modern racing: one based around geography and the other around the FIA’s superlicense system.
Young American karting talents have to make a very difficult decision at a very early age: race domestically across the U.S., and up through the collection of championships that lead directly to IndyCar and the IMSA endurance championship, or to move to Europe and tackle the open-wheel racing ladder there. The latter is an expensive and incredibly risky option, and it partially explains why there are relatively few Americans in the F1 pyramid. Some talented enough can briefly experiment with both: Herta dipped his foot in the European waters in 2015 and 2016 with Carlin — he was teammates of Lando Norris in British Formula 3 — and picked up a handful of wins across various championships, but when IndyCar feeder series IndyLights came calling in 2017, it closed the door on that pathway.
Then came the FIA superlicense system, which effectively sets the baseline requirement needed for entry to Formula 1 and has kept Herta at arm’s length for a while. The system hands out different points to finishing positions in various FIA championship series; it was originally implemented so drivers with limited experience or success in junior categories could not simply buy a seat on the grid — the dreaded “pay driver” now largely consigned to a previous era.
Many have complained about how poorly IndyCar — a non-FIA championship — is weighted compared to the Formula 3 and Formula 2 championships. McLaren driver and 2025 title championship contender Norris spoke out about this superlicense oddity when asked about Herta’s potential F2 move last month.
“[Herta’s] probably better than most drivers that are in the ranks and coming up in F3 or F2, so I don’t think he should need to race in F2, if I was the boss,” Norris said in September. “IndyCar is one of the toughest series in the world. I don’t know how many [superlicense] points they get in Indycar, but I would put them above the level of Formula 2.”
While IndyCar is widely regarded as one of the toughest and most prestigious racing series in the world, boasting a Triple Crown event (the Indianapolis 500) as its biggest race, its drivers are penalized by how relatively few FIA superlicense points the championship awards in a system largely geared in favor of FIA competition. A title win in IndyCar grants the full 40 points needed for F1 eligibility, but second place earns just 30 and third only 20; compared to Formula 2, where the top three all receive the full 40. That steep dropoff has limited Herta’s prospects. He was runner-up in 2024, for example, but got only seven superlicense points for finishing seventh in this year’s IndyCar championship, meaning he still fell short of the required tally, a quirk of a system that values F1’s feeder series far more generously than an elite, non-FIA senior competition.
Herta has also had to be incredibly patient. In 2021, it seemed like he was about to take part in FP1 at the U.S. Grand Prix as Michael Andretti looked at a deal to buy Sauber, but both the practice ride and the buyout ultimately fell through. Herta always felt like the most likely name to accompany Andretti to F1, and he remained so when the former McLaren driver was pushed aside as General Motors ramped up its involvement to full commitment — it now includes a plan to be racing with American-built Cadillac engines by the end of the decade.
Now fully integrated into the operation of F1’s 11th team, Herta looks at his long wait as a blessing in disguise.
“It is bizarre,” Herta said of the superlicense points system. “You know, I think it’s good and it’s bad. For me, it’s frustrating for so many years of being so close and not being able to do it. Like I said, this is probably my last shot, and I think this is also one of the coolest opportunities I’ve been given as far as Formula 1 goes. You know, to be an American driver aligned with an American team, backed by an American engine manufacturer, it truly is special.
“So it’s a great opportunity and, I think the positives of not making it to Formula 1 earlier would be that I have this opportunity to really learn before I get kind of dropped into the deep end of being a Formula 1 driver, hopefully at some point. I think this sets me up really nicely to be able to, if I do make it, be on the pace as fast as possible.”
On Norris’ ringing endorsement, Herta added: “That was nice to hear. I really enjoyed my time being over there racing in England, and it was fun to be teammates with Lando.
“He’s easy to get along with, really quick. I think we both kind of learned a lot off each other, and so that was a really good year for me to kind of see what he was able to do in a race car and learn off of that. Stayed in contact with him from then. It’s been cool to see what he’s been doing and what he’s been able to do. So yeah, to have a guy that’s winning Formula 1 races and whatnot say that about you, for sure, it kind of helps the cause, I guess.”
Herta’s Formula 2 debut with Hitech will be across the weekend of Formula 1’s 2026 curtain-raising Australian Grand Prix, which will also be Cadillac’s first in F1. Herta will race in the Melbourne sprint race on March 7, before the feature race on March 8.
