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After his agonising Nashville IndyCar crash, Colton Herta bounced back about as well as anyone could have hoped at Indianapolis.
It’s no surprise really. His qualifying performances on the Indy road course read fourth, third, third, second and fifth, while – a 2019 crash aside – he’s finished fourth, fourth, second, 13th and now third in his races there.
It was a relatively under-the-radar race performance. He mimicked eventual winner Will Power’s strategy, diverging only on the third stop to pit a lap later and clawing back more valuable time on Power there.
After the second stop Power had become stuck behind Herta’s Andretti Autosport team-mate James Hinchcliffe, and his lead over Herta fell from over nine seconds to just over four.
After that last stop, Herta had made ground to Power again with another second gained, but in turn Romain Grosjean had made progress on him, and then jumped Herta on the penultimate caution restart late in the race and Herta had to settle for third.
It was still a big weekend for Herta. He dominated the Nashville weekend so intensely that he said he had “tunnel vision” and that he didn’t consider a scenario where he didn’t win the race.
He also claimed to have one of the best race cars of his IndyCar career in the inaugural Music City Grand Prix, but with six laps to go after a Tennessee dogfight with leader Marcus Ericsson, he hit the wall at Turn 9.
And what happened in Nashville was still very much on Herta’s mind as he discussed his Indianapolis podium.
“It’s easy to say like, just sitting second and that’s all you’re going to get, but on a weekend like that with how much speed I had, I couldn’t see the race going any other way than me winning,” said Herta.
“I had tunnel vision with that, and I just got frustrated in the car. I think I just overdid it.
“And then it didn’t make me any happier after I crashed out.
“This was good for a nice little reset, and a great job by the team for giving me a great car to kind of get it done this weekend.”
You might think ‘Nashville is in the past, why are you discussing it now?’, or ‘didn’t The Race do a feature on this already?’. It is and we did, but the manner of that lost win had the potential to be a massive incident in the racing life of Colton Herta.
A mistake like that fighting for a win can have a profound effect on a driver. We can discuss until we’re blue in the face whether Herta had risked that move on Ericsson because he wasn’t in the championship hunt or because he’d convinced himself to his detriment that he deserved to win.
But, whatever caused it, it had the potential to be a mental stumbling block for a driver who is one of IndyCar’s most exciting and best, especially in a season that was slipping away from him after a strong start.
You know that latter point is true from Ericsson declaring keeping Herta at bay in Nashville to be probably the best drive of his career. Coming from an ex-F1 driver, that tells you everything you need to know about how he assesses Herta.
The other big thing for Herta at Indy was to re-energise his #26 team. There’s not a lot to get excited about at Andretti at the moment and getting in a funk with a string of bad results wouldn’t have been ideal. Especially as for the second year in a row, Andretti needs to finish the year strong to kickstart the next, after a poor season.
Luckily the #26 team knows it has a star in Herta, and a young one whose upside far outweighs any bad moments.
The Andretti team as a collective was important at the weekend as Herta claimed his car was “diabolical” in Friday practice, which was exactly what he didn’t need when trying to bounce back from Nashville. But adapting his team-mates’ set-ups allowed him to make a huge leap forward.
“Once in the car I was fully focused on this weekend, but it did kind of take a while to get over that,” Herta adds on his Nashville indiscretion.
“I was pretty frustrated at myself for the next few days, but this is the best thing that you can do to forget about it: get back in the race car, especially when you have a good weekend after.
“It makes it that much more enjoyable and forgettable, I guess, for Nashville.”
Herta’s proved he can move on from such a mentally difficult situation. Just another trait the young star’s added to his resume, alongside his best: his ability to learn from his mistakes, something else on show at Indy.
