Colton Herta had one job on Friday morning: keep the car in one piece long enough to climb into Sergio Perez’s Cadillac for FP1. Instead, he binned his F2 car into the Monza barriers with barely a quarter of an hour left on the clock, then had to dust himself off and go park a real Formula 1 car for the third time this season in a session that suddenly mattered a lot more than it should have.
A Big One at Lesmo
The Hitech driver lost the rear of his F2 machine at the second Lesmo corner, clipping the gravel with his left-side wheels before spinning across the circuit and slamming into the barrier on the opposite side. The rear of the car was destroyed in the impact, and the wreckage sat stricken in the middle of the track, as reported by RacingNews365.
Herta climbed out unaided and, by all accounts, uninjured. Small mercy, given the state of the car. He was taken back to the paddock to debrief with his engineers, presumably with considerably less time than he’d have liked before switching brains, seats and categories entirely.
Straight From the Gravel to the Grid
There’s no gentle way to segue from smashing an F2 car into a wall to hopping into an F1 car you barely know, but that’s exactly the turnaround Herta faced. He was due to take over Perez’s Cadillac MAC-26 for FP1 later in the morning at Monza, his third such outing this season. No warm up lap in the simulator is going to replicate the shock of watching your own rear end vanish into a barrier an hour before you’re due to drive somebody else’s championship car.
Cadillac’s decision to keep rotating young talent through Perez’s FP1 sessions has been a low-key subplot of their debut season. Given Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas currently sit rooted at the bottom of the standings without a point between them, nobody at Cadillac is losing sleep over lost track time for the race drivers. If anything, throwing juniors like Herta into FP1 makes more sense for a team going nowhere fast than protecting a session neither Perez nor Bottas is likely to do much with anyway.
Timing Nobody Would Choose
Monza’s characteristics don’t exactly reward hesitation. High speeds, low grip margins and barriers that don’t forgive mistakes make it an unforgiving place to have any kind of shunt, let alone one that leaves you with your nerves rattled and a debrief to sit through before switching disciplines entirely. Whether Herta’s confidence took a knock or he simply shrugged it off is something only he can answer, but it’s hard to imagine any driver relishing the walk from a written-off F2 car straight into an F1 cockpit on the same morning.
Practice one at Monza gets underway at 10:30 UTC, with second practice following at 14:00 UTC, check the calendar for your local time. Qualifying and the race itself follow across the weekend, with Cadillac’s focus, as ever this season, likely to remain fixed on damage limitation rather than points.
It’s the kind of morning that makes a mockery of anyone who thinks FP1 outings for young drivers are some kind of gentle career reward. For Herta, Friday at Monza has already delivered a crash course, literally, in why Formula 1 weekends chew drivers up before the serious business has even started.
