- Colton Herta says he still does not know what his 2027 season looks like, with his Formula 2 commitments and Super License push now taking priority over the IndyCar seat that made him famous.
- His streak of seven straight Indianapolis 500 starts ended in May when a late change to the F2 calendar clashed with the race, but he says he would never turn down another shot at it.
- He is already splitting his weekends between Cadillac’s Formula 1 junior program and a Wayne Taylor Racing sports car seat, chasing three different championships at once while his long-term home stays unsettled.
The Driver Who Cannot Tell You Where He Will Be Racing Next Year
Colton Herta has one answer for anyone who asks about 2027, and he gives it without dressing it up. “I don’t know what next year looks like for me,” he said this week. It is a strange thing to hear from a driver who, at 18, became the youngest winner in IndyCar history and spent the next six seasons as the most talked about American open wheel talent never to race in Formula 1. Herta is 26 now. He has won races in IndyCar, podiumed in sports cars, and run inside the top ten in Formula 2. What he has not done, after three separate chances, is land the one seat everyone agreed he deserved.
Three Cracks at Formula 1, Three Different Ways to Lose It
The first crack came through Michael Andretti’s attempt to buy into Formula 1 outright, a bid that collapsed before it produced a car, let alone a seat for Herta. The second was the one that stung. Red Bull’s senior advisor Helmut Marko kept him updated as AlphaTauri circled him for a race seat, and Herta remembers the odds moving in his favor before they did not. “It seemed very real to me,” he said of the deal. Marko’s own estimate of the chances swung from roughly 80 percent down to 40, then back up near 60, before the math that actually killed it had nothing to do with lap times. Herta did not hold enough points on his FIA Super License, the sport’s eligibility ladder that rewards drivers for racing in FIA-sanctioned single-seater series rather than IndyCar. A driver good enough to win in America was, on paper, not yet qualified to race in Europe. When the points never arrived, Herta signed back into IndyCar with Andretti and backer Dan Towriss rather than keep waiting on a door that would not open. He admitted afterward what that moment felt like: “probably won’t have another opportunity.”
He got one anyway. Cadillac, the newest manufacturer on the F1 grid, signed him as a test and development driver and pointed him toward Hitech in Formula 2, the first proper Super License points chase of his career. Asked straight out if this felt like his third try at the same dream, Herta did not hedge. “Yeah, 100 percent,” he said. The irony sits close to the surface. A driver who built his name winning IndyCar races on ovals and street circuits now has to prove himself in European junior formula against drivers a half-decade younger, simply to satisfy a points table.
A Points System That Does Not Care Who Can Drive
The Super License math is not a judgment call. A driver needs 40 points accumulated over three seasons in approved series, and IndyCar carries a lighter weighting than Formula 2 or Formula 3, even with fields that include former F1 race winners and Indy 500 champions. Herta had won races against that caliber of competition for years and still came up short on paper when AlphaTauri circled him. Patricio O’Ward, Alex Palou, and a handful of other IndyCar stars have run into the identical wall, a reminder that America’s open wheel pipeline has produced drivers Formula 1 teams want to sign far more often than it has produced drivers those teams are allowed to put in a car. Michael Andretti’s own short, unhappy stint racing in Formula 1 three decades ago still gets held up as the cautionary tale whenever an American name gets linked to a grid that has not fielded a full-time United States driver in years. Herta’s case is different in one important way: nobody in the paddock has argued he lacks the speed. The argument has always been about a scoresheet, not a stopwatch.
A Streak That Finally Broke
Herta had made the Indianapolis 500 every year from 2019 through 2025, seven straight starts that included a fourth-place run as a rookie and a program built around Andretti’s Gainbridge-backed entry. The streak was supposed to continue in May 2026 with a fourth Andretti car waiting for him. Then Formula 2 added a Montreal round to run alongside the F1 Canadian Grand Prix, filling a hole left by canceled races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and the new date sat directly on top of Indianapolis qualifying weekend. Herta chose Montreal. It was the only Indy 500 he had missed in seven years of trying, and he does not pretend the gap does not bother him. “I would never turn down” another start, he said, leaving open exactly how a fifth attempt might fit around a European racing calendar that answers to nobody in Indianapolis.
A Second Job in a Cadillac Built for Endurance
While F2 occupies his Saturdays, Herta has also climbed into the number 40 Cadillac for Wayne Taylor Racing, sharing the car with Jordan Taylor and Louis Deletraz in IMSA’s endurance season. The trio already finished on the podium at Petit Le Mans, a ten-hour test of patience and traffic management that rewards almost nothing Herta learned as a single-seater qualifying specialist. He wants more of it. The Rolex 24 at Daytona, the twelve hours of Sebring, and a return to Petit Le Mans are all on his wish list for 2027, assuming the rest of his schedule leaves room. That is the part he keeps repeating: nothing is settled until Cadillac, Hitech, and Wayne Taylor Racing all agree on how to share him.
Standings That Do Not Flatter Him Yet
None of this looks glamorous on paper right now. Herta sits 19th in the F2 standings, with a best finish of fifth in the Barcelona sprint race, numbers that would have been unthinkable for a driver who won five IndyCar races in a single Andretti season. The F2 campaign is scheduled to close out in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, rounds that remain uncertain themselves after conflict broke out across the Middle East in February and forced organizers to redraw parts of the calendar already once this year. Herta is, in effect, racing toward a Super License target that keeps moving the goalposts out from under him, for a second time in his career.
What Herta’s Limbo Says About the Ladder He Is Climbing
Bryan Herta built his name winning at Long Beach and Indianapolis before building a team that produced his son’s own breakthrough, and the Herta name has stood for American open wheel speed for two generations now. What it has never stood for is a Formula 1 seat, and the sport’s own rulebook is the reason why. Herta remains, by any honest account, good enough to race in Formula 1. He is also 26, splitting himself three ways across two continents, and still unable to say with any certainty where he races in 2027. For a driver who has already been told his odds were 80 percent and watched them evaporate once, the caution in his voice makes sense. He has learned not to count anything as real until the car is actually his.
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