Sergio Perez has said the quiet part out loud. Cadillac’s rookie F1 season, once framed as a steady climb up the grid, has actually gone nowhere fast, and the man paid to sell the dream is the one pulling the tablecloth off the table.
Speaking on Formula 1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, Perez did not reach for the usual new-team platitudes. He called the last few races a straight up disappointment, and for a team that spent the first half of the season quietly closing in on Aston Martin, that is a significant admission. Cadillac have zero points to their name. Zero. Not one. In a season where even Audi and Williams have found their way onto the board, that number is starting to look less like teething trouble and more like a pattern.
The Stall Nobody Wants to Admit
For a while, the story at Cadillac was almost sympathetic. New team, new factory, new everything, and yet they were dragging themselves clear of a struggling Aston Martin and avoiding the ignominy of finishing dead last in the constructors’ table. Then Aston Martin found aero upgrades in Hungary and at Zandvoort, Honda kept squeezing power out of its engine, and suddenly the team Cadillac had been quietly beating was gone, vanishing up the road while Cadillac stood still.
Perez put it bluntly: “On everything, I think the last few races have been a disappointment. There’s a lot of disappointment because we haven’t been developing. We haven’t been improving,” he said. “Us being a new team, this is what we should be doing, like every time. So I felt like there was a bit of a stalling in the last few races.”
That is not the sort of quote a PR department wants attached to a season review, but credit where it’s due: Perez did not dress it up. He described a team reviewing its own processes mid-season because the improvements it expected simply never materialised.
A Second Short, and Nobody Knows Why
Perez has been remarkably precise about the size of the shortfall, which somehow makes it worse. He reckons Cadillac has found around a second of lap time this year. The problem is they were hoping for two. That gap, roughly a second of pure pace, is the difference between languishing at the back and being able to bother the midfield on a Sunday afternoon.
“I don’t think we have improved as much as we hoped for. [We have found] I don’t know, a second? But probably we were looking for two seconds.” – Sergio Perez
What is more revealing is Perez’s admission that Cadillac cannot pin the blame on one single issue. As a brand-new operation, the team is apparently discovering problems scattered across load, ride and a dozen other variables that established outfits sorted out years ago. Perez insists half a second or a second would “change our life completely,” which is either a wildly optimistic read on how forgiving this grid is, or an honest acknowledgement that Cadillac is currently nowhere near close enough to know for sure.
Zandvoort: Progress or Just a Better Weekend?
The Dutch Grand Prix offered Cadillac a curious data point. Perez finished P15, still no points, but came away sounding more upbeat than his season-review comments would suggest, insisting the car’s pace was “very strong” once he got clear of traffic. Meanwhile Valtteri Bottas retired with a hydraulic issue, his sixth DNF, and admitted the car became “really inconsistent” during the second stint.
Two drivers, two very different weekends, and yet the underlying message from both was the same: there is something worth learning here, even if neither of them can say exactly what yet. That is the trouble with rebuilding a team from nothing. Every race becomes a diagnostic exercise rather than a genuine shot at points, and after a while that starts to wear even the most patient of drivers down.
Enter Budkowski, Exit the Excuses
Cadillac’s response to the malaise was to swap team principals mid-season, bringing in Marcin Budkowski ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix to replace Graeme Lowdon. Perez sounds genuinely enthused about the change, framing it as an opportunity to sharpen everything from pit stops to strategy, the unglamorous operational stuff that separates a team merely present on the grid from one that actually competes.
Whether a change of leadership fixes a second’s worth of missing lap time is another matter entirely. Team principals do not design front wings. But Perez clearly believes there is more low-hanging fruit in the operational side of the garage than in outright car development, which says plenty about how far Cadillac still has to travel before car performance is even the primary concern.
Building From Scratch, Slowly
To his credit, Perez has not sulked his way through this. He talks about the project with a level of ownership rarely heard from a driver who spent four years as a genuine Grand Prix winner with Red Bull. He insists the motivation has not dulled despite fighting for eighteenth rather than podiums, pointing out that the conversations with engineers and strategists remain identical whether you’re battling for a championship or battling to not finish last.
That is a nice sentiment. It is also, frankly, the sort of thing a driver has to say when there is no alternative narrative available. Cadillac are not winning races any time soon, and Perez knows it.
The Verdict
Cadillac’s rookie season was always going to be a slog, but slogging and stalling are not the same thing, and Perez has now confirmed which one this actually is. A brand-new team finding a second of lap time when it needed two is not a crisis. But a brand-new team admitting, out loud, that it does not fully understand why the improvements dried up? That should worry Cadillac far more than another Sunday finishing outside the points. Talk of a “massive boost” heading into 2027 is easy to say in August. Whether Budkowski’s arrival actually delivers it is a question nobody at Cadillac can currently answer, least of all Perez himself.
