F1: Team bosses reject notion of Herta getting a Super License w/o the 40 points required (Update)

Someone on Twitter came up with this analogy of why Colton Herta easily qualifies for a F1 SuperLicense:

Theoretically, if you strip away the oval races in the IndyCar championship (which obviously is a skill set that doesn’t directly translate to F1), Herta has 66 Super License points. The F1 pundits do not realize just how much ONE OVAL RACE (the Indy 500 and its double points) weighs on the IndyCar championship.

Herta clearly deserves theF1 license.

Sky F1 broadcaster Ted Kravitz believes Colton Herta should be given an FIA Superlicense, due to his status as a multiple IndyCar race winner.

“This superlicense thing was brought in basically to give a bit more credit to the likes of Formula 4, F3, and F2, and to make sure that there aren’t any drivers who weren’t prepared for Grand Prix racing,” Kravitz explained.

“Well, [IndyCar] is not a Formula 1 Grand Prix, but it is a Grand Prix and Colton Herta has won seven of them. He’s ready. He’s competent, he’s able to do it. He’s not gonna embarrass himself. He’s not gonna be a danger to anybody, himself or otherwise, no problems with that.

“So this is just a little bit of tinkering around how many years you can count, how many series you can count.

“Whilst Stefano Domenicali from Formula 1 was saying that we have to stick to the rules, I think there’s a middle way here that Red Bull should be able to get both to happen.

“I think, with COVID, there was a little bit of relaxation of the rules of super license points. You could take some from one year, you could take some from the other year. I think that’s what Red Bull are trying to do, to convince the FIA to have a little bit of latitude, a tiny bit of latitude, and that will mean that we get an American driver, an exciting American driver back in F1.”

Christian Horner explained, over the Zandvoort weekend, that the intention to release Pierre Gasly to Alpine is contingent on the FIA conceding to allow Herta into F1.

Kravitz believes that Horner’s stance shows just how much confidence Red Bull have in the driver, given they’re the team that brought the precocious Max Verstappen into the sport eight years – the Dutch driver being far less experienced at racing car level than Herta at the time.

“Christian Horner was quite clear about it on the weekend: ‘We will only let Pierre Gastly go to Alpine, if we have something truly exciting, someone truly exciting to put in his place’,” Kravitz said.

“So [Red Bull] clearly think Colton Herta is an exciting talent in Formula 1. If he is, I think we need to have him in there, and let’s get around the superlicense issue because it’d be great for everybody to have him competing in F1.”

In today’s Team Representative Press Conference ahead of the Dutch GP, several team reps were not in favor of Colton Herta being grant a F1 Super License without the requisite 40 points.

Despite winning seven IndyCar races over the past four seasons, Herta has not amassed the necessary 40 FIA superlicense points in order to qualify to compete in F1. The FIA awards a total of 124 points to the top 10 finishers in IndyCar which is far fewer than junior categories Formula 2 (201) and even Formula 3 (128).

Basically, the FIA feels IndyCar is a 4th rung feeder series up to F1, below F2 and F3.

And no one running IndyCar went to bat for the drivers and lobbied the FIA for a change. Asleep at the wheel as usual.

Suggestions the FIA could adopt a similar approach in light of Herta’s situation and allow him a super license as a matter of “force majeure” were given short shrift by some team bosses today.

“From my point of view it has nothing to do with force majeure because you have championships everywhere in the world that you were able to score points,” said Alfa Romeo team principal Frederic Vasseur.

“If the FIA want to stop the process of the points and the Super License, it’s another story. But they can do it and it’s up to them to decide if they want to stop the system and we can survive without the system, but nothing to do for me with force majeure.”

American driver hater, Haas team principal Guenther Steiner echoed Vasseur’s view. “We have got rules and regulations which we need to respect,” he said. “If we don’t respect our own rules, and try to find ways around it, I don’t think that’s correct. I mean, we could then apply that to other things as well.”

“I’m one of those who says if you’ve got rules, if we don’t respect them and just try to find ways around that why we have rules, then we need to change the rules and that is a different discussion,” he said. “If you want to change the rule, let’s speak about it but, again, there’s a governance in place.”

Their comments prompted dismay from IndyCar driver Conor Daly, who said, “Oh, what a surprise. The team principal for the ‘American’ F1 team [is] not a supporter of an American driver once again.”

Alexander Rossi, who moved to IndyCar after starting five F1 races in 2015, added: “I’m so sick of this.”

But McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl, who ran Herta in a test session at Autodromo do Algarve earlier this year, believes he should be given the chance to compete in F1.

“In terms of the Super License, I think in general we believe in the system, we think it’s a good system in place. But at the same time, we are absolutely up for some flexibility as well, also taking into account, especially the situation in the last two years with COVID and everything, it had an impact as well on results drivers could score.

“[We’re] absolutely open for some flexibility there and handing a guy like Colton the Super License because in the end, with what he has shown so far in his racing career, I have no doubt that he is absolutely able to compete in Formula 1.”

“We already had the case in the past when we changed the attribution of the points in F3, GP3 and even F2 a couple of years ago,” said Vasseur. “I think that the global picture of the championship is always changing and moving and we have to adjust the number of points for every single series now, to know if the top five of F2 is better than the top five of Indy.”

“But as Guenther said before, I think that we have a system that if we want to change or if someone has a proposal to change the point attribution, that we can discuss it,” he concluded.