Colton Herta has spent most of his professional life being told his world is “basically the same” as Europe’s ladder. Drive an IndyCar, the logic goes, and you’ve already had a decent rehearsal for Formula 2 – maybe even the mental rhythms of Formula 1. It’s a neat, comforting story. It’s also not one Herta’s buying.
Speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast, the American was pointed towards a familiar comparison from Romain Grosjean, who once argued that an IndyCar has more in common with an F2 car than people assume – simpler, less aero-sensitive, and a little more honest in the way it reacts. Grosjean’s point has always been understandable: if you’ve driven the current-generation F1 cars, anything less downforce-heavy can start to feel like it sits in the same family.
Herta’s response, though, was blunt.
“I do not,” he said, when asked if he sees IndyCar as comparable to Formula 2.
That’s more revealing than it first sounds. Herta hasn’t just dipped a toe into F2; in 2026 he’s made the full commitment, joining Hitech and pitching himself into the most unforgiving shop window in the junior system. He’s also been named Cadillac F1’s first test driver, with his path to the grid increasingly framed as a question of execution and timing rather than raw possibility.
What’s struck him isn’t a sense of familiarity, but the opposite: the small, constant reminders that he’s learning a different craft.
“The feel of the car, and how the power is put down and how the gears shift,” he said, outlining what separates the two for him. And then came the part that will resonate with anyone who’s watched experienced drivers get caught out when they change categories: “The tyre deg that you have over here is greater.”
Herta’s first F2 weekend in Melbourne offered a pretty sharp illustration. He clawed his way to a points finish in the feature race on debut, taking seventh, but left the weekend calling it “unsatisfactory” after a heavy crash in the lone practice session. In Formula 2, there’s nowhere to hide from that kind of mistake – not because the paddock is less forgiving, but because the schedule simply doesn’t allow you to rebuild your weekend.
“Yeah it is,” Herta said when asked if the format was a wake-up call. “Especially if you throw the car in the wall in practice in Melbourne!
“Practice time is so, so important when you have 40 minutes of it… you have one set of tyres.”
The F2 format has a way of punishing drivers who are used to working their way into speed. If you don’t roll out close to the window, you’re instantly spending your tyres and your time just trying to get back to neutral. Herta acknowledged the pressure that creates: fewer laps, fewer resets, and that creeping sense that you’re always one compromised run away from being on the wrong side of the weekend.
“You’ve got to get up to speed quick. Need to learn fast,” he said. “The name of the game in Formula 2 is, if you can get on the weekend with your best foot forward, you’re probably going to have a good weekend, because there’s very little time to catch up and recover.”
That’s the part of this move that’s easy to underestimate from the outside. The debate about whether IndyCar machinery is “like” F2 often gets bogged down in car specs and lap times, when the bigger separator can be procedural: tyres, session structure, how quickly you’re expected to produce a result, and how little sympathy the category has for a driver who needs a few runs to calibrate their references.
Herta also pointed to a handful of details that sound cosmetic until you’ve lived them: “The seating position is different… The sound is different.”
It all adds up to a persistent sense that his muscle memory can’t simply be copied and pasted. “There’s a lot of differences that don’t really kind of key into… The back of my brain is like, ‘Oh, this isn’t IndyCar’,” he said. “But that’s just me personally.”
There’s another layer here, too: Herta’s doing this at 26, an age that’s perfectly normal in racing terms but can feel ancient in a Formula 2 paddock dominated by teenagers with factory backing and two-dozen data points already logged at European circuits.
He joked about it when he realised he’s now racing Sebastian Montoya – after previously racing against Sebastian’s father, Juan Pablo Montoya, in IndyCar.
“I was thinking about this,” Herta said. “It made me feel old now that I raced against Juan Pablo Montoya in IndyCar, and now I race against his kid in F2, even though I’m still only 26.
“But, when you’re racing everybody and they’re like, 18 years old, it makes you feel a little bit older.”
Formula 2’s next stop is Miami, a landmark weekend for the category as it heads to North America for the first time. For Herta, it’s a rare chance to arrive at a circuit with some cultural familiarity, even if the job remains the same: learn fast, protect the tyres, and turn potential into something Cadillac – and the wider F1 paddock – can’t ignore.
