Championship position: 11th It has been a solid first half of the campaign for Cadillac in Formula 1. The scale of creating a team from scratch, in a short space of time, having a car functioning and (relatively) competitive, should not be underestimated. The fact the team arrived in Australia and were already regarded as part of the family highlights how well Cadillac adjusted to life in Formula 1.The MAC-26 was a deliberately basic car in order to ensure Cadillac could hit the ground running and thus it has regularly been adrift of the midfield, but encouragingly new components brought to the car have led to aerodynamic gains—indicating correlation is on point. Aston Martin’s dreadful season means Cadillac has often not been rock bottom, and highlights how difficult it can be to get everything right in Formula 1.There have been weaknesses. Naturally, operational issues have sometimes struck, given that Cadillac remains a nascent squad, such as allowing an SQ2 chance to slip through its grasp in Miami due to a weighbridge call. Reliability has been a bugbear, particularly on Valtteri Bottas’ side of the garage, with persistent brake and cooling problems. That reached a nadir in Austria, with both drivers forced to retire during the opening laps of the grand prix, following the team’s misjudgement over temperatures while running in traffic on a baking hot day. Sergio Perez also suffered a sudden suspension failure in Canada, bringing to an end what had been a promising grand prix, and there were further suspension issues that halted his afternoons in Belgium and Hungary.“Progress isn’t always linear—we saw the progress we wanted in the updates, in Austria the brakes were an issue, some days it’s a step forward, some a step back, all in all it’s been progress,” said CEO Dan Towriss at Silverstone.Team Principal Graeme Lowdon has calmly and methodically spearheaded the squad’s development since day one and has been encouraged.“The reality is Formula 1 is, I think, the most difficult team sport in the world,” Lowdon said. “We, as a team, have entered the sport with a bold ambition for the future, and if you’re going to do that, you enter the sport with humility and respect for the competition. This isn’t a sport you can just walk into and blow everyone away. It’s one where you have to build foundations and build a high-performance environment for your team to be in, and that’s exactly what we’re focused on doing.“Every day is a school day, and we’re just looking to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can. We have to do it in front of a few hundred million people as well, so we want to do it as professionally as we can.”Perez and Bottas have broadly performed ably, though Perez has led the charge, refreshed by a year’s absence and motivated by the nature of his Red Bull exit in 2024. Plug-in-and-play veterans are exactly what Cadillac has needed at this stage, though Perez blotted his copybook in Monaco, where he snuck into 10th on-the-road only to lose the point due to a time penalty for a clumsy grid infraction.Perez admitted that Cadillac is “a little bit behind where I thought we were going to be” but conceded that viewpoint partly came from that of a “very impatient racing driver!”“Being part of a new team, new project, you face a lot of different challenges,” Perez said. “So, I think, although we are far, I feel like if we put our things together and we manage to bring a couple of good upgrades, all of a sudden, we can be getting closer to the mix. And that would be great for our first year.”Perez admitted “the gap is too big” for Cadillac to challenge for the points in normal grands prix, but suggested that a few more development parts could put the team in the mix in “those tricky races—we can make a bit of a difference.”At this stage, and considering the rapid rate of development, understanding and remedying the reliability issues—and retaining the same delta to the front-runners—would represent a win across the rem
