Colton Herta’s split with father as strategist difficult but latest life change for IndyCar star

FORT WORTH, Texas — Fresh off a seventh-place finish at Texas Motor Speedway, Colton Herta strolled into the postrace news conference, where winner Josef Newgarden was holding court in his uniform and the customary celebratory cowboy hat given by the track.

After a wild race, Herta was in street clothes – his T-shirt said “Bass Drum of Death,” a reference to a Mississippi garage punk band – and accompanying Newgarden’s wife as the duo tried desperately to get the winner’s attention.

Newgarden needed to hurry up, they urged, because bad weather was closing in on the Fort Worth area and if they didn’t get their chartered jet in the air ahead of the storm, the trio couldn’t return to Nashville for another day.

Herta recently relocated to Nashville, where the Newgardens live and have been actively recruiting fellow IndyCar driver Scott McLaughlin and his wife to move. It’s part of a slew of life changes for Herta, the budding IndyCar superstar who for at least 15 months has been part of conversations to get the Californian a Formula One seat.

The biggest change came at Texas, where Andretti Autosport made the internal decision to remove Herta’s father as his race strategist. Bryan Herta, a former IndyCar driver who twice won the Indianapolis 500 as a car owner, is his son’s manager and had been his strategist the last two seasons.

But just like Michael and Marco Andretti, or Bobby and Graham Rahal, the father-son relationship eventually stopped working. There had been instances of in-race sniping between the two, with Colton sometimes exploding in anger and falling short on the racetrack.

Crazy one yesterday! Unfortunately didn’t have the speed at the end, but we got some good points with P7, Long Beach next