Colton Herta closed out last season as the most influential driver on the NTT IndyCar Series championship trail, and looks to carry the trend to early 2022 if he is going to clinch his first title by the end of the year. will be required.
With four races remaining on the 2021 calendar, he started in second place at the World Wide Technology Raceway and led 101 laps until a mechanical failure ended his day. Portland was a slight step back after starting sixth and finishing eighth, but Monterey saw a commanding improvement with a pole and a win. And then we had the championship finale at Long Beach where a miss in qualifying drove No. 26 Andretti Autosport Honda to 15th on the grid; Herta corrected the mistake by storming to the front and taking 43 of the 85 laps on his way to another victory.
He also wrote a crushing victory in Round 2 in St Petersburg, where he led 97 laps out of 100, but it was a mix of adversities in the seven opening races of the season that diminished Herta's chances of taking the IndyCar crown. Five of those seven races ended with a finish of 13th or worse, and with such a huge drop in the championship standings, the late-season rally only took Herta's final position, nearly 100 points behind title winner Alex Palu. Worked to improve on fifth place.
If a 21-year-old from California is going to work, he knows he can't afford to dig another hole.
"You set the mindset when you get your result in the first round," Herta told Racer. "So if we can go out there and win, that would be a big deal. How many times have we seen in the past how people win first races and win championships? Really, it's happened a lot in the last 10 years." , so it's pretty incredible what a win in the first race can do for you.
"Palu did it last year, and (Scott) Dixon a year ago, and Joseph (Newgarden) a year before that. So yeah, that's the goal, to push like that out of the gate in the first race. And St. Based on how we do at Pete, we'll figure out how to go about things from there."
Herta has two new partners to work with this year as Romain Grosjean and Devlin DeFrancesco join Andretti's four-car operation. Herta and Alexander Rossi are two returning team veterans, and despite leading last week's two-day Test at Sebring, they say the revised line-up will lead to jail time.
"It was interesting because we don't get much time to test before the season starts, so we were all working our way into Sebring," Herta said. "I know we were pretty busy all day, so we didn't get a ton of time to talk to each other. But of course we tried a few things they tried and they thought were cool, And vice versa. So it was positive all around."
Hertha and his race engineer Nathan O'Rourke are locked into their game plan of trying to win Sunday and use momentum to ignite a championship run. Once they get into more races, Herta hopes the new Andretti drivers will help prop up the team in the standings.
"Tests like ours at Sebring are really useful to get back in the car and get things flowing," he said. "We have to practice every aspect of what we can see in St. Pete's, so Sebring was more about going through a rehearsal of our plans. We're all working together and getting ideas from each other." The tossing will really start as soon as the season starts."