Herta's F1 dream stalls as crashes and breakdown define nightmare Monza weekend

Colton Herta’s path to Formula 1 took another damaging blow at Monza, where the Cadillac development driver crashed in F2 practice, broke down during his FP1 run in the MAC-26, and retired from the feature race on lap 11 — his worst single weekend of a troubled 2025 campaign.

Herta, a former IndyCar frontrunner signed by Cadillac as a test and reserve driver ahead of the team’s 2026 F1 entry, moved to Formula 2 this season to build the single-seater credentials needed for a potential graduation to the world championship. The transition has proven harder than anticipated. With no prior experience on Pirelli tyres and limited familiarity with the European circuits, he sits a lowly 17th in the F2 standings after ten rounds.

Monza crystallised the scale of the challenge. In the sole F2 practice session, Herta put two wheels in the gravel at the exit of Lesmo 2 and spun into the inside wall. Hours later, fulfilling Cadillac’s mandatory rookie FP1 requirement, his MAC-26 stopped after just one push lap with a suspected hydraulic issue. He then qualified 20th in F2, more than a second off the pace — the only time all season he has failed to reach the top 12 in qualifying, having managed that just once across the entire campaign.

A 15th-place finish in Saturday’s sprint offered little relief, and his feature race ended in the gravel at the exit of Parabolica while running 21st.

Herta has spoken of growing familiarity with the Cadillac machinery across his three FP1 appearances. “All these cars have tiny differences that make them click,” he said. “I’m driving and trying to find that, so having a bit more knowledge of what the car likes to do is a big help, it makes me feel more comfortable.”

He also acknowledged the brutal brevity of a one-hour session. “When you only have an hour, it seems like, literally when you’re inside the car and everything’s happening, everything’s happening so quick. It seems like you’re in there for five minutes, so you get out and you’re instantly like, ‘Oh I should have done this’ or ‘I should have done that’.”

The numbers in F2 are stark. Herta has accumulated just 26 points, taking only one top-12 finish in the last ten races. Championship leader Nikola Tsolov holds a 151-point advantage with 156 available across the remaining four rounds, ending any realistic title ambitions. Even a top-10 finish in the standings — currently 37 points away — looks difficult to achieve.

“What I want to do is I want to get to Formula 1 and I want to get there as fast as possible,” Herta has said. Whether his F2 results will be enough to convince Cadillac he is ready remains the central question hanging over the rest of his season.