Herta’s Monza Friday: crash in F2, breakdown in the Cadillac

Colton Herta’s Friday at Monza lasted about two hours and contained two separate problems. He crashed a Formula 2 car in the morning, then stopped a Formula 1 car in the afternoon. Neither was entirely his fault, and neither is what a driver auditioning for a 2027 seat wants on his Friday.

The crash that ended F2 practice

Herta ran wide at the exit of the second Lesmo, went through the gravel and hit the barrier. The impact did enough damage to the barrier that the session could not be restarted, so Formula 2 free practice ended there. Alex Dunne was left holding the fastest time on a 1:31.957.

Herta was unhurt. That mattered more than usual, because he was due in a Formula 1 car barely an hour later.

Then the Cadillac stopped

Herta took over Sergio Perez’s MAC-26 for first practice. He managed limited running before stopping on circuit with what the team described as a suspected hydraulic problem. Marshals worked under yellow flags and a virtual safety car before race control red-flagged the session to recover the car.

He ended the hour 22nd. His team mate Valtteri Bottas was 19th, almost three seconds off the pace. It was not a session that told Cadillac much about its car, and it was not a session that told anyone much about Herta.

Cadillac is spending its rookie sessions on him

Herta is a Cadillac development driver and a nine-time IndyCar race winner who joined the programme ahead of the 2026 season with a full-time Formula 1 seat as the target. He is running a Formula 2 campaign with Hitech alongside these practice outings, which is why he was in two different cars on the same Friday at the same circuit.

The Formula 1 runs are not only a showcase. Every team has to hand over practice sessions to drivers with limited grand prix experience during the season, and Cadillac has chosen to spend those sessions on the driver it may want in 2027 rather than on a driver passing through. Each run is also data for a team in its first year, which is the part most casual viewers miss. Monza is a particularly useful place to gather it, because a low-drag circuit exposes energy deployment and straight-line efficiency more brutally than anywhere else on the calendar.

The cost is that a bad Friday is a very public bad Friday.

Less damage than it looks

Less than it looks. A driver who crashes in one car and then suffers a mechanical failure in another has not demonstrated much either way, and teams evaluating a driver know the difference between a mistake and a hydraulic fitting.

What Herta did lose is time. He had one hour to build a picture of the MAC-26 at a circuit unlike any other, and he got a fraction of it. The next practice outing now has to do the work of two.

The more useful signal for Cadillac is the reliability question. A car that stops on Friday morning at Monza is a car whose weekend has already cost the team something, and this is a team that has spent its debut season learning how much running it can afford to lose.

Ferrari owned the rest of the hour

The rest of the session belonged to Ferrari on home ground. Charles Leclerc set a 1:23.008 to lead, Lewis Hamilton was 0.173 seconds behind him for a Ferrari one-two, and George Russell was third for Mercedes at 0.304 seconds. Liam Lawson was fourth for Red Bull and Arvid Lindblad seventh for Racing Bulls.

That order is worth watching for a reason we set out earlier this week: Ferrari has already decided how it wants to use the tow between its two cars in qualifying, and the opening session did nothing to argue against the plan.

Cadillac’s own weekend continues on more than one front. The American constructor is also racing at COTA this weekend, which we covered in our look at Cadillac’s WEC campaign in Texas.

We are following every session at Monza in the RNT-Motorsports live blog.