- Colton Herta, a nine-time IndyCar race winner now racing in Formula 2 and testing for Cadillac’s Formula 1 team, called Alex Palou’s six-year run of dominance “bizarre” and “unheard of” (per Motorsport.com).
- Herta said racing against the five-time champion is no fun: “It’s not fun being part of it, I’ll tell you that.”
- Palou’s hometown hosts the inaugural IndyCar Grand Prix of Barcelona on Sunday, July 18, 2027, while Herta looks for a program of his own.
The Rival Who Left IndyCar and Now Watches Palou on TV
“It’s not fun being part of it, I’ll tell you that.” Colton Herta said those words about Alex Palou, the Chip Ganassi Racing driver who has won five IndyCar championships in six seasons. Herta knows the feeling from the inside. He finished runner-up for the 2024 title.
Herta, 26, no longer lines up against Palou. He gave up a comfortable IndyCar seat to chase a Formula 1 career with Cadillac, and this year he races in Formula 2 for Hitech while working as Cadillac’s test driver. His latest outing was Friday practice at the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of The Americas, his fourth FP1 session of the season. IndyCar announced a multi-year deal to race at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from 2027, and Herta spoke about that race and about the Barcelona native who sits at the top of the series.
His verdict on Palou was blunt. “Well, it’s bizarre. And it’s unheard of, especially in the modern era,” Herta said.
He tied the claim to the machinery. “When things are so closely, we have a car that is a DW12, so 14 years old. You would think everybody has figured out most of what they can about the car by now. And he seems to excel in every single way. And he’s had an answer for every critique coming through.”
Herta now follows that dominance from outside IndyCar. “I’m a big fan of Alex now that I’m not racing against him,” he said. “And I appreciate it a lot watching it on TV.” He hopes a day comes when he can go back and try to beat Palou.
The Rookie Who Blew By Him on the Restarts
Herta can name the moment he first sensed Palou would be a star. It came in 2020, when Palou was a rookie at Dale Coyne Racing and the two met at Road America.
“The first time I knew he was going to be good was actually his rookie year in 2020 when he was at Coyne,” Herta said. “And I could tell maybe the car wasn’t the best. He was restarting behind me.”
Herta remembers what happened next. “And he blew by me. He was so good on the restarts. He had two or three chances. We had two or three restarts, and he was always right behind me.”
The following year Palou moved to Chip Ganassi Racing and won the first of his five titles. Palou “wins the championship the following year, second year in IndyCar,” Herta said, and he called that “super impressive” and “probably the toughest time ever to win IndyCar races.” His explanation: “the cars are very similar” and “we’ve had them for so long.”
The record backs him up. Palou’s titles came in 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. In 2026 he became only the second driver in series history to win four in a row, joining Sébastien Bourdais, who did it from 2004 to 2007. He also won the 109th Indianapolis 500. This season he took six wins and eight poles and finished in the top 10 in 15 of 18 races. Across his career he has 25 wins in 116 starts. Herta has nine wins.
Herta pointed to the way Palou answered his critics. “I think the biggest thing is anytime that people have had critiques of him, he’s had an answer for it,” he said. “He won his first championship and he was very poor on ovals. And then the following year, he won on the oval. And then the year after that, he won the Indy 500 and won multiple times on ovals. So, yeah, it’s very impressive.”
Only A.J. Foyt, with seven titles, and Scott Dixon, with six, have more championships than Palou.
No Onboards, Poor Data and a TV Broadcast
IndyCar gives its drivers little to study. Unlike Formula 1, where Herta now spends part of his working life, IndyCar teams cannot get other teams’ onboard video and receive restricted GPS data.
Herta laid out how thin the information is. “The GPS data that we do get is very poor,” he said. “So what you can do is you can watch the TV broadcast, basically. They never show the pole lap.”
In Formula 1 every car gets an onboard, Herta said. In IndyCar a team has to pay for one, and usually a sponsor does. Palou, in Herta’s telling, does not have one. “He’s never had one, whether that’s by design or whatnot. I don’t know. A lot of people talk about it,” Herta said.
That leaves a driver who wants to beat Palou with the same television coverage as everyone else. Herta had kind words for Palou off the track too. “He’s a good friend and a really good competitor. And I really enjoy racing against him and wish him the best. And, yeah, he’s cool to watch on TV.”
Herta’s Own Year Is Going the Other Way
As of the United States Grand Prix weekend, Herta sits 19th in the Formula 2 standings with 26 points. His last points with Hitech came in the Belgian round before the summer break. His best result of the year was fifth in the sprint race at Barcelona in June, the same weekend he had his first Formula 1 FP1 session of the season.
The season is expected to finish with rounds in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, depending on events in the Middle East. “I’m just disappointed with how the year’s gone. It’s not been good at all,” Herta said.
Formula 2 was meant to give him the experience and superlicence points for a Formula 1 debut. He has grown jaded by the pursuit of that license, a topic that came up as early as 2022, when Red Bull-run AlphaTauri showed interest in giving him a seat. Herta and Cadillac have turned to FP1 sessions for the points he still needs. At COTA he completed 21 laps in the MAC-26, running aerodynamic experiments that should guide Cadillac’s development for 2027. “Whatever they tell me to do, I do it,” Herta said. He is hopeful one more practice outing later this year will lift him to the 40-point threshold. “To be honest, I don’t know where I’m at, but I believe so,” he said.
The weekend also took him back to the place where his career took off. On March 24, 2019, Herta became the youngest IndyCar race winner ever, at COTA, aged 18 years and 359 days, and he did it for the small Harding Steinbrenner Racing team. “This is where it all started, basically,” he said. “It was my third start in IndyCar, and I started third.” Driving the Cadillac there felt “super special to be able to do it here at home, in front of the home crowd, with the Cadillac.”
His future is less settled. Valtteri Bottas holds the seat alongside Sergio Perez, and Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski did little to dispel doubts over it. Herta did not rule out a return to Formula 2 if Cadillac keeps Bottas for another year or settles for a left-field option. “My goal is still to be in Formula 1 as soon as possible with Cadillac, with GM, with TWG and this is where I want to be,” he said. A year on the sidelines as a reserve holds little appeal. “I’m at such an important time in my career where I’m starting to get into those prime years,” Herta said. “I want to be in something cool that races somewhere in the world.”
A Home Race for the Champion in July
Herta backed the Barcelona race. “Yeah, I think any of these tracks IndyCar would perform amazing on,” he said. “It’ll promote really good racing for IndyCar. Obviously, Alex being a Spaniard, it’s super important, I know, for him. And hopefully the country rallies behind it and they show up so that the race can be there for a long time.”
Fernando Alonso, the two-time Formula 1 world champion, welcomed the decision and added a word of caution about international expansion.
The inaugural IndyCar Grand Prix of Barcelona is scheduled for Sunday, July 18, at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, which opened in 1991 and has hosted Formula 1 and MotoGP events. IndyCar last raced outside North America in 2013, when James Hinchcliffe won on the streets of São Paulo, and its last European race came in 2007 at TT Circuit Assen in the Netherlands. Penske Entertainment Corp. President and CEO Mark Miles said the series got a call from Barcelona, and the talks ran about four months. “This could be the home base for INDYCAR in Europe,” Miles said.
Palou, 29, is the only Spaniard in the field, and a race in his hometown once seemed unimaginable to him. “Incredible for me,” he said. “I never thought that there would be any day that INDYCAR would come to Barcelona.” He does not think he has to carry the whole series through Spain. “It’ll be my hometown race, but it’ll be the home race for more than 10 drivers that are from Europe, and they are only a couple hours away from here.” He called himself “just like a passenger here” and said he plans to “enjoy every single moment.”
The next race on the IndyCar calendar is the March 7 event on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. Palou has five titles, one short of Dixon’s six and two short of Foyt’s seven. Herta is still working out his own program, and his goal remains a Cadillac seat. Herta wants to go back and try to beat Palou, and in his words the reason is simple: “he’s been doing it to me for too long.”
