Colton Herta left IndyCar for Formula 2 to finish his superlicence. The last points require a top-eight season, and he is 18th..
The FIA raised the superlicence points it awards to IndyCar drivers for 2026, a change RaceFans reported in December 2025 and one aimed squarely at the pathway that had kept Colton Herta out of Formula 1. Herta had spent years as one of the fastest drivers on the American open-wheel grid and still could not reach the 40 points the FIA demands. The rewrite closed most of the gap. It did not close all of it, and Herta chose to close the rest by stepping down a rung.
Herta paused his IndyCar career to race a full 2026 Formula 2 season, and he did it as the named test driver for the incoming Cadillac team. He was blunt about the reason, calling the move "my last shot at reaching F1" when it was announced, a rare thing for a driver to say on the record about his own plan. The logic was legible: convert a proven reputation into the final superlicence points, put the number beyond dispute, and give Cadillac a reason to promote him.
The last points are the ones he has to race for
The remaining requirement is a Formula 2 result, not a diary of appearances, and that is the detail the optimistic version of this story keeps skipping. Herta's Cadillac first-practice outings satisfy a separate FIA practice-distance requirement, but they are not what closes the gap to 40 superlicence points. Those come from the championship itself: RacingNews365 lays out the arithmetic, and PlanetF1 the same, a top-ten finish in the 2026 F2 standings pays superlicence points and rises to the full 40 for the leading drivers. Sources differ on his exact banked total, some counting 34 and some 36, but they agree on the gate: the last of the points needs a season that finishes eighth or better.
He sits 18th after the first half of the campaign, with points in a handful of races and none of the front-running pace an IndyCar star dropping a category was expected to show. That places the final superlicence points behind exactly the on-track step his season has failed to make, from the middle of the order into the top eight. The comforting frame, that the paperwork is nearly done and only the proving is lagging, has the mechanism backwards. Eligibility has not come apart from readiness. The last of the eligibility depends on the readiness, and the readiness is the part that is missing.
Cadillac already made its 2026 choice
Cadillac's two race seats for its debut season went to Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas on multi-year deals, confirmed by Formula 1, with Herta named test driver rather than racer. So the seat Herta is auditioning for was never a 2026 seat. It is a 2027 opening that does not formally exist yet, and the case for it is being written in the F2 midfield in real time, one weekend at a time.
Every weekend he finishes in the pack is a weekend that case gets harder to make. A midfield F2 season strengthens the argument for keeping experienced drivers in the cars while a new team finds its feet, and it undercuts the clean pipeline story an American manufacturer bringing an American star up the FIA ladder would prefer to tell. A promotion from test role to race seat is a bet on upside. Eighteenth in Formula 2 is not the evidence a team reaches for when it wants to justify that bet.
IndyCar-to-F2 conversion is the wider subject sitting underneath the individual one, and it is close to untested in this direction. Drivers climb the European ladder toward IndyCar or cross from it into sportscars; a front-line IndyCar driver dropping into F2 to force an F1 door open is nearly without precedent at this level. Herta is the test case, and the result of the test is that the drop has not yet delivered the pace the plan assumed it would surface.
The next number comes at Spa
Formula 2 reconvenes at Spa-Francorchamps from July 17 to 19, the third of four rounds before the summer break, and the superlicence and the seat now hinge on the same figure: where Herta finishes. The FP1 mileage will keep ticking over in the background, but it settles nothing that matters. He said this was his last shot at F1. He has half a season of results left to make the standings agree with him.