Just call it the Curious Case of Colton Herta.
This weekend marks the third-from-last event of the 2022 IndyCar season, and the final oval race of the year, on the egg-shaped World Wide Technology Raceway outside St. Louis. The real-time storyline on Saturday night will be the seven drivers separated by only 59 points as the championship trophy comes into view, especially the battle between the 40-something set, as leader Will Power fights to hold off summer resurgent Scott Dixon, who seeks a record-tying seventh title.
But the eyes of the Formula One world, as they have all season long, will be focused on the kid who is nearly half their age and sitting an insurmountable 135 points in arrears, ranked 10th after some midsummer struggles and more than likely to be mathematically eliminated from the title fight this weekend.
None of that matters. Not to the F1 crowd. Not to the seemingly ever-growing American F1 audience. And certainly not to the even more important group of American corporations seeking to have their logos on an F1 machine driven by an American racer.
Nearly all of the above have already anointed Herta as that driver. The Chosen One. He who will finally bring balance not to the Force, but to the forces of open-wheel racing.
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“Every racer wants to drive in F1, but my goal as a kid was to be where I am right now, in IndyCar, so I also try hard to stay in the moment, where I am,” the 22-year-old explained earlier this summer. “But I am flattered, and who wouldn’t be?”
He is, after all, the youngest driver to win an IndyCar race, which he did three years ago at age 18. He’s won six more races since, many on tracks with serious Formula One pedigree, from Circuit of the Americas in Austin to Long Beach to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course.
He is young. He is sneaky funny. He comes from a racing bloodline, begat from father Bryan Herta, a member of the 1990s Champ Car “Rat Pack” with the likes of Helio Castroneves, Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan. He plays drums in a rock band. He even has awesome hair.
“There are guys who create buzz for the wrong reasons, and then there are the guys who create it for all the right reasons, and Colton is one of the right ones,” current Andretti Autosport teammate Alexander Rossi said of Herta in May. “And to be…
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