1,000 Greatest Drivers: Colton Herta

While he inspires annoying discourse, his greatness should now be beyond dispute.

I have tried to avoid declaring any drivers locks for my 1,000 greatest drivers list too soon because it can be difficult to evaluate a current driver’s trajectory. When I was first trying to determine who my locks would be for this list, I had Alexander Rossi as a lock because it looked like he was poised to become Josef Newgarden’s chief rival for titles not that long ago, but over the past half decade, he has largely faded to irrelevance with only a single race with a pass for the lead since 2020. Rinus VeeKay, the driver Rossi is replacing, had more natural races led and is higher in my teammate model too, so I don’t consider Rossi a lock anymore. I’m probably still gonna list him, but I’m much less sure than I would have been a few years ago. As a result, I didn’t want to make the same mistake with Herta. While he looked like he was on a potentially championship-caliber trajectory, he was indeed really, really sloppy in 2022 and 2023, probably because he was wildly overdriving to impress the F1 teams that were in a bidding war over him. After previously watching Rossi, Ryan Briscoe, and Graham Rahal all becoming essentially two-year wonders before fading into irrelevance, I wanted to make sure the same did not happen with Herta before I added him.

This year, he finally convinced me. His two big flaws that limited him were his exceedingly poor racecraft and his rather abysmal oval record. This year, he cleared both of those up as his racecraft has never been better and he finally had a lot of oval speed. It honestly felt almost as if Herta and Josef Newgarden had done a body swap this year because Herta drove like Newgarden usually does and vice versa as aside from Newgarden’s Indy 500 win, he was running into things and doing stupid stuff all season. Herta is now well past the Briscoe/Rahal/Rossi tier, as he now has over 16 lead shares while they only have 6-10. He even has more lead shares than his ex-Andretti teammate Ryan Hunter-Reay, although RHR had an absurdly lucky career and Herta has had a pretty absurdly unlucky one. Herta’s stat line almost exactly matches that of Kenny Bräck’s now (except that Bräck was a great oval driver who was awkward on road courses, while Herta was a great road course who was awkward on ovals), and I had Bräck as a lock long ago:

Furthermore, Herta will always be directly linked with Pato O’Ward because they competed in Indy Lights together. Both drivers have winning records against all their regular IndyCar teammates, and O’Ward is the only teammate Herta has lost to (he didn’t even lose to Lando Norris). Although I think O’Ward is still better (in addition to beating Herta, he beat Rossi by a larger margin than Herta did), it’s certainly close. O’Ward leads active IndyCar drivers in my model overall while Herta is 5th, but he’s closer to Scott Dixon/Álex Palou/Newgarden than they are to O’Ward. And I already had O’Ward as a lock. Clearly, Herta is close enough to O’Ward that it’s time to make the call.