Daniel Ricciardo’s fifth place in Canadian Grand Prix qualifying for RB was a glimpse of why people – including key members of Red Bull’s Formula 1 hierarchy – still believe in him. A reminder of the driver they knew was still there somewhere, of the performance he was capable of delivering when everything went smoothly.
Around the same time, some 700 miles away from Montreal, on a damp North American racetrack, a driver who might have been in that RB F1 car did something similar. Actually, there is something more impressive.
And it also didn’t give them the results they wanted in their races.
Rewind 21 months to the final ripples of the driver market turmoil sparked by Oscar Piastri spurning Alpine for McLaren (and, ironically, Ricciardo’s seat), and what was then called AlphaTauri only landed the ultimately disappointing Nyck de Vries as the replacement for the headed Pierre Gasly Alpine. because he couldn’t get dispensation for IndyCar star Colton Herta to get a superlicence.
De Vries didn’t last long before being ousted for Ricciardo.
Will Herta fare better? Had the FIA deemed it necessary to apply a similar regulatory discretion that appears to apply to the current case of Kimi Antonelli (much to the annoyance of the IndyCar community), would Herta – not Ricciardo – be at RB today?
Perhaps not. He arrives with far less F1 and European racing experience than De Vries, and faces a tougher acclimatization process at a team prone to impatience.
It has now been more than two years since Herta won an IndyCar race. The super license is slipping away as he has only finished 10th in the last two championships there.
He’s still in the F1 mix long-term considering he was one of Andretti’s picks, but that has only served to enmesh him in the F1 entry saga. And is he clearly a better bet for the next American driver in F1 than IndyCar teammate Kyle Kirkwood?
And yet… last weekend at Road America – the largest road course in the United States – Herta was two seconds quicker than anyone else in wet practice. His margin in a wet start to qualifying was also disappointing for his rivals. He was definitely on course to take pole before the red flag came up for Josef Newgarden’s brutal crash.
Newgarden also hindered Herta’s race, accidentally spinning him backwards in the first corner as everyone was checking to avoid tangling with Ganassi’s teammates Linus Lundqvist and Marcus Armstrong at the front.
However… Herta recovered from last place to sixth, through his own battle with Lundqvist and off-sequence strategy. He finished just 3.5 seconds behind Kirkwood – who led the early laps – in a race that went without a full yellow card from lap nine of 55 onwards.
Herta is only 24 years old. There’s still time for his career to look very different.
Is the gap between his talent and speed and race results determined by him or Andretti or a combination of both? Is he just a racer at a very high peak who will always be inconsistent in between, who will always lose his mind as the race gets away from him, who will make mistakes and blunders – like falling while fighting for the Indianapolis 500 lead as he did this year than waiting for the time? Was his failure caused by his circumstances or did he create those circumstances?
Today, he looks like IndyCar’s answer to F1’s mid-1990s Jean Alesi.
You know there’s a very special ability there, you just don’t know if he’s actually able to channel it properly when it matters. You’re afraid he’s coming to the end of his career – as far as it seems at the moment – having not really achieved what he’s supposed to do.
Will Herta qualify for fifth place RB for the Canadian GP?
He might be quite fast, once he has F1 experience. How many current F1 drivers can finish a wet practice session at Road America by two seconds? Maybe not much, even if they have IndyCar experience.
There’s something special about Herta and it’s been clear since he started his full-time IndyCar career and won straight away.
His pace is to become IndyCar champion and/or the most competitive American in F1 in decades. Do the remaining packages exceed that raw speed? Will we get a chance to find out?
Too many question marks, not enough results. Not yet.
But a miracle like that Road America weekend is enough to make you wonder and hope that one day we’ll get a chance to see those questions answered, in an environment that allows Herta to make the most of all that promise.
#case #IndyCars #biggest #conundrum
