Any Hope Of Seeing Colton Herta In This Year's Indy 500 Is Officially Dead

There was a chance that Colton Herta — despite leaving his full-time IndyCar duties to race in Formula 2 — could return to the series for a one-off appearance in the Indianapolis 500.

However, those chances are now officially dead.

Herta spent seven full seasons in IndyCar before leaving to become a test driver for the Cadillac F1 Team and to race in Formula 2 in hopes of securing the necessary superlicense points to enter F1 at some point.

His first race weekend in F2 — which was part of the F1 season-opener weekend in Melbourne — went alright, with the American scoring a handful of points in the Feature Race as he tried to come to grips with the machinery.

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But, after that race, F2 had over a month off before the next scheduled races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

But then a war broke out in the Middle East, and that led to both of those weekends being scrapped.

That would have meant that F2 would not race from early March in Australia until early June when the series reconvened in Monaco.

That gap is, frankly, absurd, so the series did something about it and added its first-ever round in North America with weekends in Miami and Montreal as support races for F1.

There's just one problem if you're Colton Herta: that Montreal race is the same day as the Indy 500.

According to the Associated Press' Jenna Fryer, Herta was in the running to hop in a fourth car for Andretti Global alongside Will Power (who replaced him), and his old teammates Marcus Ericsson and Kyle Kirkwood.

But now, with the way the schedule works out, that simply won't be doable due to his commitments with his F2 team, Hitech GP. 

In fact, while session times haven't been announced yet, there's a good chance that the F2 Feature Race — which comes in the hours leading up to the Grand Prix on Sunday — may take place at the same time as Indy.

It's a bummer for fans to not get to see Herta make a unique, one-off homecoming, but unfortunately, F2 races simply aren't an option.

Herta is currently tenth in the standings, and since Herta's mission is to grab superlicense points, which are tied to a driver's position in the standings at the end of the year, missing an entire race weekend would make accomplishing that much harder and could cost a shot at F1.

And, of course, getting to Formula 1 was the whole point of moving from IndyCar to Formula 2.