The new Cadillac F1 team has shown signs of progress, but reliability has proven to be an Achilles Heel in their first season. In the modern era, it was never going to be easy to start an F1 team from scratch, even with a lot of collective experience in the camp. Teams are now hugely complex beasts, even compared to when Haas became the last newcomer to join, with a lot of support from Ferrari, in 2016.
There is so much reliance on past data and IP that to start from a clean sheet is a huge task, even with everyone else also facing new regulations, as was the case with 2026. Just getting the first car together and ready for testing in January was the initial major challenge, and Cadillac did a better job than incumbents Aston and Williams, both of whom ran late.
View Price on AmazonCadillac has arguably done better than many expected, and Sergio Perez deserves some praise for that. After being dropped by Red Bull, he returned from his enforced 12-month break refreshed, and in his own words, the Mexican driver has often outperformed the car. The streets of Monaco allowed the former winner to shine. The best qualifying performance to date saw him just miss making Q2, and he then survived a chaotic race and benefited from retirements and penalties for others to finish P10 on the road – only to lose a precious point to a penalty of his own for not lining up on the grid properly for the late red flag.
Monaco was an outlier, but recently the new team has regularly outpaced the struggling Aston Martin at several venues. However the gap to the main midfield runners, never mind the front of the field, remains significant at “normal” tracks. Inevitably, there have been operational and reliability challenges, and the last three races have produced several examples of how much can only be learned by coming across real world issues, and tackling them one at a time.
In the Montreal race, Perez suffered a very public right front suspension failure, caught by his onboard camera. The team later determined that it was due to a one-off error in the garage, rather than a design fault that had to be rectified. Both drivers suffered with brake overheating during the Monaco weekend, something that emerged at a track where there are lot of big stops, and not many straights for effective cooling.
Source: roadandtrack.com
