Colton Herta enters this weekend’s Honda Indy 200 event at Mid-Ohio with a new race strategist on the timing stand for his No. 26 Andretti Autosport Honda.
Andretti Autosport COO Rob Edwards (pictured above with Herta), who’s been attached to Devlin DeFrancesco’s No. 29 Honda since 2022, will become Herta’s third race strategist of 2023 as the team makes another personnel shuffle among its NTT IndyCar Series entries in a bid to improve its results.
“We’ve had fast cars this year with four poles from eight races, but we’ve only won one race,” Edwards told RACER. “So we need to keep looking at ourselves and how things are working and how we can improve.”
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The change takes place after Herta came close to turning his pole position and dominant race performance into victory at Road America, but the premature timing of his final pit stop — and a refueling issue during that pit lane visit — turned the potential of earning his first win of 2023 into a fifth-place finish.
Herta started the year with his father Bryan Herta overseeing the strategy on the No. 26 car, but the elder Herta was moved to the No. 27 Honda piloted by Kyle Kirkwood for Round 2 at Texas Motor Speedway, and earned the team’s lone win at the following event at Long Beach.
Andretti’s Scott Harner, who started the year as Kirkwood’s strategist, was moved to Herta’s car and served in that role through Road America. With Edwards’ move to Herta’s car, Harner will fill the race strategy vacancy on DeFrancesco’s No. 29 entry.
The four-car team, which Edwards says will remain at four next season, is also using the latest round of race strategist rotations to get an early look at the best timing stand pairings for 2024.
“This is really part of a bigger process we’ve been doing for a while now,” said Edwards, whom DeFrancesco calls ‘Uncle Rob.’ “We took Michael [Andretti] off Romain [Grosjean’s No. 28 Honda] for a bit and now he’s back there again.
“We’ll be moving forward with four cars, so now is as good a time as any to just shuffle some things here, take a look at things, put Scott on the 29 car with Devlin, and put me on the 26 car. And now Devlin can have ‘Uncle Scott’ instead of ‘Uncle Rob.’”
