Colton Herta took pole for Sunday’s IndyCar Ontario Honda Dealers at Toronto with a lap time of 59.8320 seconds. It’s his third pole in his last four races at Toronto, and comes as Herta looks to defend his 2024 win and salvage a strong result for his 2025 season.
“The car’s still that much faster than everybody else. I didn’t know that was my third pole here.[…] I think it’s kind of just what this team is capable of around here for the street courses. [We] continue to be, I feel like, a dominant force in the league for that kind of style of racing.”
Barely escaped elimination
Herta had a close call with round one elimination but managed to finish fifth, 0.0434 seconds ahead of Kyffin Simpson in seventh but 0.1112 seconds behind the fastest time of the session from Marcus Armstrong.
“It felt like what I was feeling in the car yesterday on the red tyres, we were very uncompetitive then. I think we had a lot of understeer. The front was sliding a lot. It wasn’t reacting well to the bumps. I think once we were able to make some of the changes we did, it just brought the car to life. They were really minor things. It was a really big offset on balance. For what we did, I was really surprised how reactive the car was to it.”
Reactive enough to put Herta on IndyCar pole at Toronto
He then came in third in round two, just 0.0763 seconds off teammate Kyle Kirkwood’s fastest time. While Kirkwood, who has the last two street circuit wins at Detroit and Long Beach, ran into trouble on his Fast Six runs and will start sixth, Herta’s pole lap wound up 0.2758 seconds ahead of championship leader Alex Palou.
In Herta’s assessment, the race is going to come down to alternate tyre life. “That’s a big question mark. Is it going to be four laps? Is it going to be 20 laps? It’s really not sure yet. It will be more of an answer after warm-up to what the race is really going to look like tomorrow. I think we have the ability to be fast on both. But I’m glad it’s the harder compound tyre race because I think we’re really strong on those.”
Herta needing a result amidst a challenging 2025 IndyCar season
Herta’s win in 2024 was the spark to a closing stretch of five top-5 finishes in his last six races. At this point so far he has just three top-5s all season, sits just ninth in points, and with five races remaining a visit to a track where he’s never finished worse than 7th—and hasn’t finished off the podium since 2019—could bring a much-needed end to his slump.
“I think we struggled this year on a lot of things. Unfortunately it’s showing up on Sundays. We haven’t been able to perform well. For everybody, it’s super frustrating. We want to do well. We’re striving to do better every weekend. It’s a tough sport, so any little thing that we drop the ball on, it creates a big impact.”
