The usually stoic Colton Herta couldn’t contain his excitement after climbing from his victorious NTT INDYCAR SERIES car Sunday at Nashville Superspeedway, and he didn’t yet know that the win in the Big Machine Music City Grand Prix Presented by Gainbridge elevated him to second in the final standings. He had finished 10th each of the past two seasons.
“It’s amazing,” he said after all the season-ending information set in. “I couldn’t have asked for a better ending to the year.”
The win was Herta’s first on an oval track in this series. His only other win on this type of track was in 2018 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway when he held off Pato O’Ward in the Freedom 100 in INDY NXT by Firestone.
On this day, Herta used a daring pass of his longtime rival and one-time teammate with five laps to go. The move came with the lapped car of Sting Ray Robb in their path. O’Ward went high, Herta low. After they both cleared Robb, Herta surged past O’Ward on the backstretch.
“We had a pick to play off of,” Herta said of Robb. “The whole race I was getting all my passing done off of the corners. I was really able to drive middle to exit off the corner and get the power down really nicely.
“That was what that was, and we were showing it off. Luckily, we had just enough room between me and Sting Ray. There might have been a small nudge there, but I had to use every bit of him to accelerate onto the straight.”
The win gave Herta, 24, two victories this season in the No. 26 Gainbridge Honda of Andretti Global with Curb-Agajanian and nine for his six-year and 99-race career.
Herta, who finished third in the second Hy-Vee Milwaukee Mile 250 race Sept. 1, said the first series oval victory was too long in the coming.
“It’s about time,” he said. “I think there’s been multiple times where I thought we could have won or should have won, and numerous things happened to stop us from doing that. Luckily, today we got it all right.
“We needed a little bit of help … in the form of a little bit of traffic to catch back up to Pato.”
Traffic certainly helped Herta swipe the lead from O’Ward, but he had been gaining on the driver of the No. 5 Arrow McLaren Chevrolet since making his final pit stop on Lap 180 of 206. O’Ward made his last stop on Lap 161.
Perhaps more significant was the overall lift it gave Michael Andretti’s organization, which hadn’t won on an oval track since Alexander Rossi went to victory lane at Pocono Raceway in 2018. That was 101 races ago, a drought that seemed unfathomable as the team won series championships – and oval races – with Tony Kanaan (2004), Dan Wheldon (2005), Dario Franchitti (2007) and Ryan Hunter-Reay (2012). The latter three joined Rossi (2016) and Takuma Sato (2017) as winners of the Indianapolis 500 presented by Gainbridge with Andretti.
Andretti Global showed its oval strength in more ways than one over the weekend. Kyle Kirkwood won the NTT P1 Award as the fastest qualifier, his first such honor on an oval track. Kirkwood finished fourth and likely would have fared even better had he not been pushed down in the order after the first caution of the race came just after he had pitted.
Kirkwood said the team’s performance on an oval “is big for the confidence for next year.”
Herta was asked if that was a statement win toward chasing his first series title in 2025.
“I hope so,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of things we could have done to win the championship this year. I think we’ll reflect on that, look at it going into the offseason.”