Colton Herta doesn’t sound like a driver clinging to a decade-old anecdote to prop up an F1 bid. If anything, he tells it like someone who’s heard the story repeated often enough that he’s had time to poke holes in it himself.
Yes, Herta has now confirmed the long-circulating paddock line that he went quicker than Kimi Räikkönen in a Sauber simulator test — and also ahead of Antonio Giovinazzi. It happened at the Hungaroring, back when the Hinwil operation was racing as Alfa Romeo and when Michael Andretti’s attempt to buy the team had Herta heavily linked to an F1 seat for 2022.
“It was true,” Herta said on the Beyond the Grid podcast, before immediately pulling the handbrake on the inevitable conclusions. The point, in his view, isn’t that he “beat” a world champion, but that simulators are exactly what they are: tools, not trophies.
“It’s cool to be able to say you’re faster than them in the simulator,” he admitted, “but it doesn’t really mean much unless you can do it in real life.”
That scepticism is telling, because if you’re trying to sell yourself into Formula 1, the temptation is to dine out on anything that sounds like a headline. Herta instead frames it the way teams tend to: a sim run is a data point — a hint that a driver might be worth spending more time and money on, not a definitive ranking of ability.
“I think it’s a good thing for teams to see,” he said, “and then they’re like, ‘Okay, maybe he’s worth the investment of a test.’”
The original story was given extra weight by Mario Andretti, who claimed that by day three of Herta’s time in the simulator, the American was faster than both Räikkönen and Giovinazzi — the team’s then race drivers. But whatever momentum that created never translated into a seat. Andretti’s takeover bid for Sauber fell apart, and the 2022 Alfa Romeo line-up ultimately became an entirely different pairing: Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu.
Herta’s recollection of that visit has the texture of a driver seeing, up close, how the top tier lives — and realising how quickly the door can swing shut.
He spoke warmly about the facility itself, lingering on the hardware that tends to impress racers more than corporate statements ever do. “It’s a really cool factory that they have there,” Herta said, “and especially the wind tunnel setup that they have there. It was neat to see all that while that was going on.”
There was also a small cameo that reads, with hindsight, like a snapshot of F1’s constant churn: Herta met Bottas for the first time because the Finn was there doing a seat fit ahead of his move from Mercedes.
“It’s the first time I met Valtteri,” Herta said. “Unfortunately, nothing came of it. But it was a cool time to have a little bit of an insight into it.”
That’s the recurring theme in Herta’s F1 orbit: proximity without permanence. He’s been close enough to touch the furniture, close enough to run laps — virtual ones, at least — but the chain of events required to turn interest into an actual contract has repeatedly snapped.
He even referenced another opportunity that later collapsed, an AlphaTauri route that didn’t materialise. Add it all up and you get why Herta’s simulator story resonates: not because it proves he’s “faster than Räikkönen”, but because it’s one of those little pieces of evidence that he belonged in the conversation long before his current chance arrived.
Now that chance has a name and a timetable. Herta is set to make his FP1 debut with Cadillac at the Spanish Grand Prix, a meaningful step in a process that, in modern F1, is as much about building a portfolio as it is about outright speed. For a driver trying to break through, a clean, competent practice outing can be more valuable than a thousand speculative links — because it becomes something teams can grade, debrief, and compare.
It also puts Herta’s simulator humility in context. He knows how the sport works. He knows that one headline-friendly lap time, even against decorated company, doesn’t guarantee anything. But he also knows teams are always looking for reasons to take the next step with a driver — to extend a test, to widen a programme, to start taking the idea seriously.
“That’s a cool thing to say!” Herta joked of the Räikkönen comparison. He’s right. It is. But the more interesting part is that he doesn’t seem especially interested in saying it unless it leads somewhere concrete.
Spain, at last, offers that opportunity.
