INDIANAPOLIS — Colton Herta of Andretti Global was the biggest mover in Saturday’s Sonsio Grand Prix at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway when he finished seventh after starting 24th.
But the driver of the No. 26 Gainbridge Honda sure didn’t look happy as he sat on the pit wall after climbing out of his race car on pit lane on Saturday.
He was upset at another driver.
That driver happened to be his teammate, Marcus Ericsson.
In the race, the two drivers were racing each other hard around the 14-turn. 2.439-mile road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before the two cars banged into each other. The contact sent Herta’s Honda off course and through the gravel.
He was able to drive the car back on the race course and proceeded to race his way to a near top-five finish, but that wasn’t enough to make the driver who lives in Nashville, Tennessee happy.
“Your teammate is leading the championship, and you race him like an ass like that,” Herta said, referring to Ericsson. “I don’t know what you’re thinking. He probably broke deeper than in qualifying right there, and he runs me clean off the track.
“You’ve got to be smarter than that, man. So, so dumb.”
Ericsson finished 16th.
Herta entered the race with a one-point lead in the championship standings, but dropped to fourth, 25 points behind the leader and race winner Alex Palou.
“Definitely room for improvement,” he said. “Really, really solid pit stops, solid strategy. The team definitely made my job a lot easier today picking up positions. A lot of it was fuel cycle, good stops, undercutting a lot of guys. That’s how we made the majority of our positions up. There was a scenario there where we get a podium.”
Beyond the incident with Ericsson, however, was some impressive racing from the driver who is the son of former IndyCar racer Bryan Herta.
“It felt good,” the younger Herta admitted. “I was not starting up front and running up front, but sometimes you have to push through adversity, and you have to start at the back and that’s what we did today.
“The guys did an incredible job. All the pit stops, the strategy, everything about today was really nice and a place that’s typically very hard to pass, but we went from 24th to seventh.
“We had a really good race car today. It doesn’t always end up like that, but, you know, luckily you need some luck when you’re starting back there. I don’t really care too much right now.”
Herta doesn’t believe the loss of point is “that big of a deal” because the season is still early.
Instead, he is shifting his focus to Tuesday’s opening day of practice for the 108th Indianapolis 500.
“Confident, confident,” Herta said. “There’s going to be a lot of stuff to do next week for us to get ready and understand our confidence better, but excited for it.
“I can’t complain too much about today.”