Herta Clears Superlicence Threshold and Puts Bottas's Cadillac Seat in Doubt

Colton Herta has reached the points total required for a Formula 1 superlicence, removing the regulatory barrier that has kept him out of a race seat for four years. For Valtteri Bottas, that changes the shape of the next few months. Cadillac’s first season has produced no points after 20 rounds, and the team’s American test driver is now eligible to replace him.

RacingNews365 reports that Bottas has already been asked about Herta’s milestone. The Finn knows the arithmetic as well as anyone. A new team with no points, a home-grown driver now eligible to race and three rounds left to make a case: that is the situation he takes to Las Vegas on 22 November.

The paperwork that blocked Herta in 2022

To see why this matters, go back to the autumn of 2022. Red Bull wanted Herta at AlphaTauri for 2023 and had the seat available. What it lacked was a driver with a valid superlicence. The FIA’s system requires 40 points accumulated over the previous three seasons, and Herta’s IndyCar results fell short under a points scale that has long been criticised for undervaluing America’s top single-seater series. Red Bull explored an exemption. The FIA declined, and the move collapsed.

That episode explains the shape of Herta’s career since. He stayed in IndyCar, then stepped away from it to race in Formula 2 this season while taking on Cadillac’s development role. Few established IndyCar race winners would accept a junior-category drive in their mid-twenties. Herta did so because it was the most reliable route to the points he lacked. Now that he has them, Cadillac no longer has to ask whether it can promote him. It has to decide whether it should.

That makes for a much harder conversation for Bottas, because the question is no longer theoretical.

Cadillac’s blank column after 20 rounds

The standings frame everything. Cadillac sits 11th of 11 in the constructors’ championship with zero points. Aston Martin, 10th, has seven. Williams, ninth, has 12. Audi, the other team in its first season under a new identity, has 28. Cadillac is the only team on the grid yet to score.

Brazil was a fair illustration. Sergio Pérez started 22nd and finished 18th, a lap down, ahead of only Carlos Sainz and Rafael Camara. Bottas was not among the 20 classified finishers. Further up the order, the race showed how a weekend can reward risk: Max Verstappen came from 21st on the grid to finish second, and Lewis Hamilton salvaged two points from 20th. Neither path was open to a Cadillac.

Some context is necessary. A team starting from nothing, with an all-new chassis in the first year of a new set of technical regulations, was always likely to struggle. Haas scored in its first race in 2016, but it did so with a technical partnership with Ferrari that Cadillac’s model does not replicate in the same way. The more relevant precedents are the 2010 entrants, Lotus, Virgin and HRT. None of the three scored a point that season, and their drivers spent the year fighting each other rather than the midfield.

Seen that way, a zero is not a verdict on Bottas. It does, however, leave him without the one thing an experienced driver usually relies on in contract talks: a column of results that speaks for itself.

What Bottas brings that Herta cannot

The case for keeping Bottas is substantial, and Cadillac would be unwise to dismiss it.

He won 10 Grands Prix in five seasons at Mercedes, where he was part of a team that won the constructors’ title every year he was there. He then spent three seasons with Alfa Romeo and Sauber, a team in slow decline, before returning to Mercedes as reserve driver in 2025. That gives him an unusual range of experience: the best-run operation of the hybrid era, a struggling midfield outfit, and a year observing a top team from the inside without the pressure of racing. A new team needs exactly that kind of reference point. When engineers ask whether a correlation problem, a tyre warm-up deficit or a pit-stop process is normal, Bottas can tell them what good looks like.

That matters most in a second season. The first year of a new team is about reaching the grid and finishing races. The second is about turning a year of data into a car that can fight the teams directly ahead. Removing one of the two drivers who generated that data, and replacing him with someone for whom every circuit will be new in an F1 car, carries a real cost. Herta’s F1 mileage has come from testing and development work. That is valuable, but it is not the same as 20 race weekends of feedback under competitive conditions.

Bottas is also 37, and teams are understandably wary of committing to drivers late in their careers. Yet Fernando Alonso and Hamilton are both older and still racing, and age is rarely the decisive factor when a team needs stability.

The American argument

The case for Herta is partly sporting and partly commercial, and Cadillac should be honest that the second part carries weight.

Cadillac is an American manufacturer entering a championship that has spent years building its audience in the United States. The calendar already includes three American races, with Las Vegas next. An American driver in an American car is the clearest possible expression of why the project exists. It is also a story the team’s original backers, the Andretti family, pushed from the start, and Herta was long associated with that bid.

On the sporting side, Herta is 26 and was regarded as one of IndyCar’s quickest drivers over a single lap. He would be an F1 rookie, but not an unproven one hoping to grow into a seat. If Cadillac intends to be competitive in three years, it makes sense to invest in a driver who will still be at his peak when the car is good enough to exploit it.

The cautionary tale is Logan Sargeant. Williams gave the last American in F1 a seat in 2023, partly with the market in mind, and lost patience during 2024 when results did not follow. The lesson is not that American drivers should be avoided. It is that nationality cannot be the main reason for a signing, because the scrutiny is heavier and the patience shorter when the commercial argument is so obvious. Herta’s results in the junior category this year help on that front. Promoting him simply because he now qualifies would not.

Three races to score Cadillac’s first point

Bottas’s immediate task is simple to state and hard to achieve. Las Vegas and the two rounds that follow offer three more chances to score Cadillac’s first point, and whichever driver does it first will take a powerful argument into the winter. Las Vegas in particular has produced unpredictable races, with cold track temperatures, tyre graining and safety cars all capable of reshuffling a field. Brazil showed that teams who rarely score can still collect points: Nico Hülkenberg took one for Audi there from fourth on the grid, and Arvid Lindblad finished 11th for RB from 18th.

Beating Pérez matters too. With both cars outside the points, the head-to-head between team-mates is the only internal measure Cadillac has, and management will weigh it heavily. Pérez’s seat is not secure merely because the headlines focus on Bottas. If Cadillac concludes that Herta must race in 2027, the team will compare its two current drivers, and the seat will go to whoever has given it more.

The decision itself should rest on a broader view than three weekends. Cadillac’s 2027 car will be the first it designs with a full season of its own data behind it, and that is the year in which an experienced reference driver earns his salary. The sensible course would be to run Bottas for one more season alongside a clear commitment to Herta for 2028, rather than introducing a rookie into a team still learning to score. Herta’s superlicence has made the swap possible. It has not yet made it the right move. Bottas cannot rely on the team reaching that conclusion, however, and his best chance of influencing it is a point in Las Vegas.