Red Bull close to signing American driver Colton Herta for sister team AlphaTauri

AlphaTauri are close to agreeing a deal to sign American racer Colton Herta for 2023 to replace Pierre Gasly.

Although under contract for next season, Gasly is Alpine’s number one target to replace Fernando Alonso having failed to secure the services of McLaren-bound Oscar Piastri.

Over the last week it has been reported that AlphaTauri, Red Bull’s sister team, have been eyeing up IndyCar star Herta and are happy to let Gasly leave should they land the 22-year-old.

This much was confirmed at last weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix by Red Bull team principal Christian Horner, who told Sky Sports: ‘We’re not going to release Pierre if we don’t have someone exciting lined-up.’

Later, he would tell Autosport: ‘I think he [Herta] is an exciting talent. He’s a younger American guy that’s been a standout talent in the US, so it’ll be very interesting to see how he performs in F1.

‘And F1 obviously is growing in popularity in the US market at the moment, and to have a successful US driver could be very interesting. It could be interesting for us, in the longer term.

‘We’ve got contracts with our existing drivers, but AlphaTauri have produced a great stable of drivers for us to draw upon, whether it be Sebastian [Vettel] or Max [Verstappen] or Daniel [Ricciardo] over the years.’

Herta made his IndyCar debut in 2018, and has since gone onto win seven races, finishing third in the standings in 2020.

He was linked with a seat at Alfa Romeo for this year before they signed Zhou Guanyu and over the summer tested for McLaren, where he was said to have put in some incredibly impressive lap times.

However, there is one crucial hurdle that needs to be overcome before Herta can join the Formula 1 grid, namely his lack of superlicense points.

Drivers need to