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Not long ago it seemed like Formula 1’s interest in IndyCar talents might be higher than it had been in decades.
Admittedly that was entirely down to the enthusiasm of one team – McLaren.
But from Pato O’Ward’s Abu Dhabi F1 test last December and the programme being put together in older cars for Colton Herta to the revelation than an F1 ‘opportunity’ was pivotal in champion Alex Palou trying to ditch Ganassi for Arrow McLaren SP in 2023, there appeared to be three realistic chances for an IndyCar race-winner to transition to a leading F1 team.
As time has passed, it’s become clearer that this process has been more about McLaren lining up some interesting leftfield options for the mandatory rookie runs in Friday practice at grands prix than the team deciding IndyCar was the ideal pool to pick its next F1 drivers from. It seems set to replace Daniel Ricciardo for 2023, but with Formula 2 champion Oscar Piastri rather than an IndyCar star.
So is IndyCar just not a viable route to F1? Do the trio McLaren has explored have any hope of getting on the F1 grid?
This week’s episode of The Race F1 Podcast took an in-depth look at what makes IndyCar drivers still look towards F1 no matter how much success they have in America, and the elements that make moving between the series particularly challenging.
Special guest JR Hildebrand – not just a long-time IndyCar racer and The Race IndyCar Podcast co-host but a driver who was given a shock shot at fighting for a Force India F1 seat at the end of 2009 – and Scott Mitchell also assessed Herta, O’Ward and Palou’s chances of making it in F1.
They’re not the only F1-worthy talents on the 2022 IndyCar grid. But most others in that bracket have either been and gone in F1 already or are not of the right age profile for an F1 switch now. And double champion Josef Newgarden, who is also now 31 years old, has previously indicated that as it’s unlikely a top F1 team would take someone straight from IndyCar, he didn’t see much attraction in swapping what he’s got with Penske for the grand prix midfield.
Here’s a taster of our podcast panel’s debate around O’Ward, Herta and Palou’s F1 hopes, and why they think only one of them has a slightly realistic chance.
PATO O’WARD
There was a lot of excitement last December when the spectacular Arrow McLaren SP racer with the extraordinary car control was given the F1 test chance he’d been promised for taking the modern McLaren IndyCar project’s first race win.
But afterwards it not only took a surprisingly long time for O’Ward’s McLaren IndyCar contract renewal to be agreed, but there was relative silence regarding him and F1 – with McLaren announcing at the same time that it was going to give Herta some F1 mileage.
Mitchell’s understanding is that the Abu Dhabi test just wasn’t quite impressive enough to make a case for accelerating O’Ward towards F1.
“I don’t think Pato wowed McLaren in a way that means he’s got in the door enough to really get a shot there,” he said.
Hildebrand suspects O’Ward is going to have to make an even bigger impression to force his way onto the F1 grid because the series already has Red Bull’s Sergio Perez to appeal to Mexican fans so there’s no commercial urgency to get him in the field.
“He’d be more in a mode where he has to be super-impressive to be able to maintain a presence and standing in this conversation,” said Hildebrand of O’Ward’s F1 chances, albeit while adding: “Pato is just as good as Colton, frankly.”
And in character and personality terms, Mitchell feels O’Ward staying in IndyCar would be a loss for F1 – the Mexican having made a bigger impression on our writer in a late-2021 interview.
“It was one of the most open and honest conversations I’d had all year, and it was the first time I’d met the guy,” said Mitchell. “He was just on the rev limiter the entire chat!”
O’Ward is possibly also not helped by perceptions that might have been formed when he was briefly grabbed by Red Bull in 2019.
It had been impressed by his Indy Lights title and stunning early IndyCar races, but a Formula 2 one-off and handful of Super Formula races was an odd way to deploy him.
“Pato never really got a fair shake,” said Mitchell of Red Bull’s dalliance with him.
“That bizarre stint he had on the Red Bull programme where he got thrown in to Formula 2 for one race weekend, he was on an absolute hiding to nothing doing that.”
ALEX PALOU
Though the reigning champion reached IndyCar via the Japanese scene, he also spent plenty of his junior career on the European F1 ladder. He was a winner in EuroFormula Open (pictured above), GP3 and Formula V8 3.5, never looking like a superstar in waiting but rarely in a great team/equipment situation given budget limitations.
“He had a really piecemeal junior career because he was always- not hand-to-mouth as such, but the end goal was always just to become a professional racing driver,” said Mitchell.
“He had no idea where that would be. I remember covering BRDC Formula 4 when George Russell won the championship [in 2014] and Palou turned up for one weekend at Silverstone mid-season, and was really good.
“He came out of nowhere, was top six all weekend on his first go in the car, and then disappeared! And it was like ‘who was that guy?'”
Palou’s IndyCar career so far has been incredible. Quietly impressive as a rookie with Dale Coyne Racing in 2020, he earned a surprise Ganassi chance and toppled six-time champion and team legend Scott Dixon at the first attempt to win the 2021 title.
But now his career is in chaotic deadlock after the farcical day in which Ganassi announced it had extended his deal for 2023 hours before McLaren announced it had signed him. It will have to be resolved in court, and Palou’s camp is now in the bizarre situation of taking legal action against the team currently running him.
“I don’t think anyone even knows where the guy’s going to be racing next year, which makes it even harder to predict if he can ever get to Formula 1,” said Mitchell.
Both he and Hildebrand think the aptitude Palou showed in conquering IndyCar so quickly would stand him in very good stead for F1, though, if his circumstances were more straightforward.
“He’d be an interesting one to watch, having seen how quickly he adapted to IndyCar,” said Mitchell. “It would be fascinating to see how he got on in an F1 context.”
Hildebrand added: “Of the lot of them, Alex is the guy in the IndyCar Series who is the most Scott Dixon-esque.
“He’s the guy that takes everything that’s available to him, has a lot of bandwidth for every situation, he’s super smooth, he’s able to just go out there and get what’s there in an altogether unexciting way.
“It’s just like ‘oh, Alex is on top of the board’ and you’d watch his onboard and it doesn’t look really hairy or necessarily even super-impressive compared to other guys.
“He has that innate ability that maybe in a weird way from a driving style perspective is what would best suit getting in an F1 car from among the three of them.”
COLTON HERTA
There are two reasons why Mitchell and Hildebrand think Herta’s F1 chances are more realistic than O’Ward and Palou’s: sheer ability, and the fact there’s a team trying to build an F1 future around him.
The Andretti organisation has made very clear that Herta will be in the cockpit if it gets the F1 opening it’s desperately pushing for.
Whether that happens is a moot point. But if it does, Andretti is likely to be more willing to commit to a longer-term transition process for Herta than an established F1 team might.
Herta was Lando Norris’s Carlin team-mate in what was then called MSA Formula in 2015, a season with a lot of echoes of what’s happened in his career since.
“Herta was really highly-rated and there was even a little bit of a feeling that he might actually be slightly faster than Lando,” said Mitchell.
“He was just binning it a little bit too often!
“My big concern is that as early as Formula 4, the worry was that he was super-fast but he makes too many mistakes and he throws it off.
“Lando Norris joked that his nickname in F4 was ‘Hooligan Herta’ because he was so quick in the high-speed corners but he just kept binning it.
“I now see what he does in IndyCar, and he goes from these insane peaks where he looks like clearly the fastest driver in the field – and he actually is, there’s no one on his level on his day – and then he’s put it in the wall again.
“He just won’t learn. He’s like the Charles Leclerc of IndyCar. It’s like ‘come on, man, I know you can do this – just stop binning it!'”
But Hildebrand sees plenty of upside in that sheer raw speed and the fact Herta is still only 22 years old and developing.
“He’s most free of restraint when it comes to extracting pace, and is a guy who can get in and manage to create something from nothing somewhere,” he said.
“You can’t ignore him. That’s what happens with some of these guys: they make enough of an initial impression that teams and sponsors and everybody else will just for years remember how incredible that first go was and think ‘surely we can figure out a way to get that back out of them?’.
“And he’s still young. He’s in the right spot of still having peak performance and an ability to learn and adapt to how things work in a different way.”
F1’s ambivalence about the Andretti entry is rooted partly in a feeling that it doesn’t need an American team to stimulate US interest in the championship.
But an American driver might be a different matter, and Hildebrand thinks Herta is better-placed to capitalise on this than some compatriots were.
“He’s an American who people really think of as being American,” he said.
“I think this was partly Alexander Rossi’s downfall when he got to F1 – he came up through the junior formula ranks in Europe, which probably made him best prepared to actually get in an F1 car and be good.
“But an American audience didn’t even know who he was.”
While Mitchell expressed concern that the possibility of Herta topping one session then crashing in the next might not go down well in F1, both he and Hildebrand said it was too simplistic to just look at the errors.
“While there’s frustration at this inability to learn from mistakes, our IndyCar correspondent Jack Benyon says that on the technical side there have been such clear steps on fuel-saving, tyre management and that kind of thing from Herta,” said Mitchell.
“So he has shown an ability to adapt and evolve and identify weaknesses, and crucially act on them.
“One of the things that often frustrates us about F1 drivers is when there’s a level of stagnation in their development and I think it would be very unfair to say that Colton hasn’t improved.
“As a driver, he’s just refining himself all the time. And you can see he’s becoming a really, really interesting prospect.
“But he does blot his copybook with the high-profile errors.”
While the technology and car behaviour differences between F1 and IndyCar are wide right now, Hildebrand reckons the American series is an underestimated school when it comes to technical feedback and working with engineers, and that element might be appreciated in F1 too.
“You’re much more dependent in IndyCar on for instance making the car better through practice one with just the available tools and adjustments that your engineer has,” he explained.
“If you’re a good IndyCar driver, you’re used to being really involved in that engineering conversation.
“Colton in particular knows exactly what he needs from the car and what that feeling’s like. Any time you see him go out and stick it on a pole, it’s in part because he’s worked with Nathan O’Rourke, his engineer, to get the car into the place where he can go and be that guy in that qualifying session.
“He’s always been good at knowing what he needs, figuring that out and explaining it to an engineer.”
