Colton Herta’s first proper taste of a Formula 1 weekend is close enough now that it’s stopped feeling like a concept and started feeling like a timetable. He’s already been through Cadillac’s Silverstone base, already done the seat fit in the MAC-26, and in Barcelona he’ll finally step into an F1 session for real with an FP1 outing ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix.
“It’s definitely a pinch me moment,” Herta admitted on Beyond the Grid, speaking from Cadillac’s headquarters. The subtext wasn’t hard to catch: this is the point where the dream stops being something you say out loud and becomes something you can mess up if you’re not ready.
What stood out, though, wasn’t the obvious awe of a multi-time IndyCar race winner staring at the sport’s sharp end. It was the small, oddly specific detail that tells you how granular this jump is going to be for him — and how quickly the romance gives way to ergonomics.
Herta described the physical differences between the cars he’s known in the US and what he’s stepping back into in Europe. The big one is posture. In the European open-wheel machinery, he says, the front of the tub rises more, which leaves your feet higher than in an IndyCar. The result is familiar to anyone who’s swapped between categories: similar feel through the back and shoulders, but a different relationship with the pedals and, crucially, a slightly compromised line of sight because the chassis “comes up on the front a bit more”.
That sounds like a footnote. It isn’t.
In modern F1, where you’re living on millimetres of brake pressure and the car’s response changes corner to corner with energy deployment and tyre state, the cockpit is part of the performance. And Herta is bringing a quirk with him that’s going to matter the moment he starts chasing repeatability.
Most drivers like a heel rest. It gives you a reference point, a stable base, something to pivot around when you’re blending brake and throttle and trying to make that feel identical lap after lap. Herta? He doesn’t use one, and not because he hasn’t tried.
“The only thing that’s weird about me is I don’t like to run a heel rest,” he said. “When I push the pedal… I actually push with my toes, and so my heel comes up. And so if I run a heel rest, then I can’t get forward with my heel. It kind of stops it.”
It’s the kind of admission that makes engineers sit up. Not because it’s “wrong” — drivers are a museum of odd habits — but because the pedal box in an F1 car isn’t a casual preference item. It’s a tightly packaged, heavily optimised piece of the chassis environment that has to work with the driver’s biomechanics, especially under the kind of braking loads that expose every weakness in technique.
Herta says he doesn’t even know why he does it, other than tracing it back to karting. Habit becomes muscle memory; muscle memory becomes identity. “I can run a heel rest,” he added, “just it never gets used because my heel ends up just flying over the thing.”
If you’re Cadillac, that’s both a headache and a gift. A headache because a driver who naturally brakes “toe first” — effectively lifting the heel and reaching into the pedal — may want a different pedal position, different spacing, maybe even a different idea of what “support” means compared to the typical F1 baseline. A gift because if you can build a cockpit environment that suits a driver’s instinct, you remove friction from their learning curve. And for a team still establishing itself in the paddock, smoothing that curve matters.
Herta’s 2026 programme is already doing the obvious heavy lifting: he’s back in European open-wheel racing with Hitech in Formula 2, putting himself in the shop window and reminding people he can adapt. He’s also Cadillac’s test driver, meaning he’s in the building, in the simulator, in the conversations — the unglamorous access that usually precedes opportunity.
So far, he’s been quietly productive in F2. Two feature races, two points finishes: seventh in Melbourne, eighth in Miami. Not earth-shaking, but credible, and more importantly consistent, which is what you need when you’re trying to convince the F1 world you’re not just visiting.
Barcelona FP1 will be the first moment the wider audience gets to attach a stopwatch to the story. But inside Cadillac, the evaluation will be more layered than a single lap time: how quickly he finds reference points, how clean his feedback is, how naturally he adapts to a car that asks you to be precise in a way IndyCar rarely demands, and how his technique — including that toe-first braking habit — translates when the whole operation is moving at F1 speed.
Herta’s “pinch me” line is relatable, but the more revealing part of this is how unromantic the next step actually is. F1 doesn’t care how long you’ve wanted it. It cares whether you can do the boring things perfectly, repeatedly, under stress — and whether the car fits you as much as you fit the car.
Sometimes that comes down to something as simple as where you put your heel.
