Colton Herta finds himself in a place of comfort he’s been seeking and missing in recent years.
He’s latched onto the kingmaker’s formula in the No. 26 Andretti Global Honda, using consistency to propel himself to second in the NTT IndyCar Series championship with four races left to run. Eight finishes inside the top five made this possible, and with one more road course to use to his benefit—five of his eight career victories have been on road courses — he has a chance this weekend in Portland to narrow the 59-point advantage held by Chip Ganassi Racing’s Alex Palou.
His best championship output came in 2020 when he placed third; holding onto his current position and possibly improving it by one spot the focus of his world.
“We’re in a good spot,” Herta told RACER. “Obviously we want to be better, and we want to close down the gap to Alex. I think Will Power gained like 40 points on Palou at Iowa, so it’s not over yet. If we can have a good race here — and it’s basically double points at Milwaukee with two races there — we can have good two races and we’re not out of this thing.”
Herta is also wary of Team Penske’s dominance on ovals where the last three races are held.
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“This end of the year, the Penskes are going to be very strong; obviously they’re going to be fast at Milwaukee,” he said. “We saw that in testing and from what we saw in testing at Nashville, so it’s a bit of a two way thing. I have to protect from the guys behind me, but I really have to try and track down Palou.”
Beyond his return to title-fighting form as a driver, Herta’s benefitted from a reinvigorated Andretti team which has found the necessary speed to challenge—even if it’s a somewhat remote chance—for a championship against IndyCar’s two biggest juggernauts in Ganassi and Penske.
“It’s weird, you know?” Herta said. “I think there was a point in 2019 where everything was just working. The cars were super fast. This is my rookie year. [Former teammate] Alex [Rossi] won two or three races. I won two races. [Ryan] Hunter-Reay won a race. The team had five or six or seven race wins and Alex finished third in the championship, and then with the aeroscreen and whatnot [that arrived in 2020], we lost a little bit of performance, and we’ve been gaining ever since.
“And it’s not to say that we haven’t had fast race cars. We’ve had fast race cars a lot of the time, but just not consistently enough. I think this year we’ve had that. Iowa was a big Achilles heel for us. Gateway was another big Achilles heel for us, and we went well at both. Obviously we’ve been making small gains, and this year we were able to make big gains on both ends.”