Cadillac have confirmed Colton Herta will take the wheel for FP1 at Monza this weekend, his third outing of the season and his third audition tape for a potential seat.
The American will bump Sergio Perez from the car for the opening hour of practice at the Italian Grand Prix before Perez climbs back in for FP2. It is the standard arrangement that has followed Herta around all year, first in Barcelona, then in Hungary, and now at one of the sport’s most unforgiving circuits.
A Very Different Kind of Test
Barcelona and Budapest are high-downforce puzzles where a driver leans on the car’s grip through long, sweeping corners. Monza is nothing like that. It’s a low-drag shootout where the car skates around under braking and rewards nothing but precision, particularly through the chicanes that punish even the smallest error.
“This is an excellent opportunity to experience different aspects of the MAC-26. Having driven on the high-downforce tracks in Barcelona and Budapest, the challenge will be very different in Monza. With the car set up for low drag, it will move around more, placing a greater emphasis on accuracy at the braking points and on threading the eye of a needle across the curbs in the chicanes.” – Colton Herta
That’s a driver talking himself up for exactly the kind of session where mistakes get magnified and clean laps get noticed. Herta clearly knows what’s riding on it.
The Perez Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud
Cadillac have been generous with Herta’s track time, and generosity in F1 rarely comes without a reason. Perez has scored zero points across the season for the team, sitting rock bottom of the drivers’ championship alongside teammate Valtteri Bottas, and Cadillac have yet to register a single point in the constructors’ standings either. Handing a promising junior three FP1 sessions in one campaign isn’t just development box-ticking, it’s a rolling assessment of who deserves to be sat in that car full-time.
Herta is chasing a race seat with Cadillac for 2027, and every lap in Monza this weekend doubles as a pitch to the team bosses watching the timing screens. He’s not just there to gather data on tyre degradation and brake bias, he’s there to remind everyone what he can do when it actually counts.
Juggling Two Championships at Once
What makes the timing even more interesting is that Herta’s FP1 outing lands in the same weekend as his ongoing F2 programme, which also continues at Monza. Two race weekends, two disciplines, one circuit. It’s a demanding ask for any young driver, but it’s also exactly the kind of workload Cadillac clearly want to see him handle before committing to anything permanent.
The Italian Grand Prix weekend gets underway with FP1 on Friday 4 September at 10:30 UTC, followed by FP2 later that day. Qualifying follows on Saturday 5 September at 14:00 UTC, with the race on Sunday 6 September at 13:00 UTC; check the calendar for your local time.
Cadillac’s Silent Verdict
Nobody at Cadillac is going to say out loud that Perez’s seat is under threat from a 26-year-old with three FP1 sessions to his name. But actions speak louder than any press release, and handing Herta repeated running at circuits as varied as Barcelona, Budapest and now Monza looks less like routine development and more like a slow-motion evaluation with a very obvious conclusion waiting at the end of it.
