Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Colton Herta’s first official Formula 1 practice outing for Cadillac at Barcelona became a significant step in his F1 push, as he completed the team’s full FP1 program and then followed it with his best Formula 2 qualifying result of the season.
Herta packed both developments into one Friday. He went from F2 practice to Cadillac’s FP1 session in the MAC-26 and back to F2 qualifying, ending the day with 27 laps completed in the F1 car, a lap time 4.334 seconds off the pace and less than two seconds slower than Valtteri Bottas in the other Cadillac. Over the radio during the session, the team told him “we made all our points,” confirming the development work it needed had been completed.
What stood out most to Herta was the raw performance. Asked what surprised him, he said: “Just the speed of the car, right? Whenever anybody talks about the F1 car on a push lap, it's just the outright speed of it. It's the most impressive part.” He added: “The braking, the acceleration, the cornering. Every part of it is just faster than anything I've done, so it's very impressive.”
That did not make the adaptation simple. Herta said he was “learning the whole time” in a car that demands a driver trust what the engineers say it will do, particularly with the behavior of the 2026 power unit. “You think you're going to enter at a certain speed. Then all of a sudden the car starts slowing down and you push even more in,” he said. “So kind of learning that trust, because you can really take advantage of it in some places as a driver.”
Cadillac chief racing officer Marc Hynes framed the session as more than a routine rookie appearance. “It's the start of the journey,” Hynes said, calling it “a milestone for the team” and “a milestone for the driver.” He added: “He did a great job for us. We got the programme completed, and we got the data we needed.” Hynes also said the move from IndyCar to Europe was always going to be tough because Herta is learning new tracks and, crucially, the tyres a driver “need[s] to know” to reach F1.
Barcelona mattered because it also gave Herta his clearest sign of progress in F2. He qualified eighth, his best Saturday-grid result of the year after earlier qualifying finishes of 14th, 14th, 19th and 14th. Herta said the improvement was helped by familiarity with the circuit, where he had three pre-season days in the F2 car. “This is the place where I probably have the most experience,” he told The Race. “So coming back to something that's a little bit more familiar, I think was very helpful.”
The race results showed that the breakthrough is still only partial. In the sprint, Herta dropped back early but managed his Pirelli tyres well enough to fight back toward a first F2 podium, only to lose it with a final-lap lock-up at Turn 5 that dropped him to fifth. Sunday was harder again, as he used up his tyres, slipped out of the top 10 late on and finished 15th in the feature race.
Even so, the weekend carried weight beyond the final classifications. Herta’s FP1 outing added a superlicence point and left him only a handful short of the 40 needed for F1 eligibility, while Cadillac team principal Graeme Lowdon has already made clear that Herta’s move into F2 was meant as an acclimatization project built around learning tracks, tyres and race weekends under pressure. Barcelona did not complete that process, but it offered the clearest evidence yet that both sides are starting to get something tangible from it.