The novelty of Cadillac is starting to wear off - but that's a compliment

Early March, when Sergio Perez crossed the finish line at the Australian Grand Prix in 16th, there was an enormous sense of pride permeating the Cadillac garage and hospitality.

Entering Formula 1 under its complex new regulations with little testing, the championship’s first genuine start-up team in a decade immediately cut a respectable figure. While it wasn't troubling the rest of the midfield and still bumped against a number of reliability gremlins and operational kinks, the US-owned and largely Silverstone based operation - for now - didn't look out of place one bit.

Now, Cadillac is not a project that is short on resources, but it's hard to overstate just how monumental an achievement that is given it didn't have any 2025 data - never mind a car - to build around.

Fast forward five months and the picture looks rather different. After languishing behind, Aston Martin's substantial Hungary B-spec chassis has lifted it firmly back into the midfield, leaving Cadillac behind on the back row of the grid. Aston's upgraded Honda engine in Zandvoort should further boost its performance, while Williams - Cadillac's other direct rival - is expecting to make a significant improvement to its very poor 2026 car at Baku in September.

Cadillac has trickled out a substantial number of upgrades of its own, which is impressive for a new team, but outdeveloping established teams is proving very ambitious while it keeps struggling with the same old reliability issues, highlighted by its second double DNF (first time being Austria) due to overheating brakes in Hungary.

In that kind of situation, the drivers are usually a good barometer, and it's clear that the lack of progress in some areas is starting to frustrate them.

Cadillac is without a point after 11 rounds of F1 2026

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Perez and Valtteri Bottas, two veteran grand prix winners who have seen it all, are having to thread a needle here. Balancing their excitement at a fresh chance, building a new adventure from the ground up, with the frustration of trundling around at the back, which is the exact situation Bottas grew so tired of at Sauber.

When asked whether the season had gone as expected, Perez was blunt about his assessment of the team. "We are a little bit behind from where I thought we were going to be, to be honest," Perez said in Belgium. "I was really hoping that we were going to make a lot more progress. Obviously, racing drivers are very impatient. Being part of a new team, new project, you face a lot of different challenges.

"It's just a new operation, people finding their feet, and not making as much progress as we thought we were going to make from the beginning of the year."

"When I read the various media reports, we're being measured as if we're a team that's been in the paddock for a long time. We can't complain about that" Graeme Lowdon

When Autosport put those comments to team principal Graeme Lowdon, he felt his drivers were going about their impatience and frustration the right way, using it as fuel to propel the team rather than sour the mood.

"Being in the game long enough, that’s exactly the comment you would get from an experienced driver," Lowdon said. "The drivers are always going to want to push the team. You ask anybody if they’re happy with the performance within a team, and the reality is, in Formula 1, nobody’s ever happy until you leave, because you’re constantly looking to improve.

"One thing I would say is that I really like the way they’ve gone about it, because some drivers could push too hard, and if you push too hard in this game at the wrong time, the results won’t come. It’ll actually be negative. You need a degree of tension to constantly improve, and I think they've hit the right level."

The feel-good factor is starting to wear off at Cadillac

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Following 11 race weekends with only modest progress, Cadillac is starting to be judged differently now.

More harshly, perhaps.

That's not a slight on the team's monumental efforts behind the scenes. If anything, it's a compliment. A sign that it is treated like a proper F1 constructor, receiving the respect that it wanted to earn. With that also comes expectation.

F1 is about performance, not participation, and Lowdon is well aware of that.

"When I read the various media reports, we're being measured as if we're a team that's been in the paddock for a long time," he observed. "We can't complain about that. I think it's actually quite a compliment that we're measured on that same yardstick, because it shows that we've turned up with a professional approach.

"We've had respect for the competition, which we always said that we would. We're trying to build a platform for the future, not just a kind of 'wham-bam, here we are'."

What Cadillac has done is put to bed any horror stories about how damaging it would be for F1 to have an 11th team turn up and be woefully out of place, evoking memories of underfunded entries battling the 107% mark in qualifying.

Cadillac's in-season development looks better against the context of this being the first year of the 2026 regulations, and therefore its competitors all finding chunks of lap time too - left, right and centre.

An efficient development timeline is of greater importance in F1 2026

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The American outfit has to match that and more, and the 2.6s it was off the benchmark in Hungary Q1 compares favourably to the 3.1s it shipped at its Melbourne debut. It's a difficult task when it is still building some of its foundations. There are also issues related to being a start-up team that are making its reliability problems tougher to solve, because it doesn't have a vast bank of IP to build on.

"Obviously, we've had a number of DNFs, all fundamentally to do with cooling on the brakes, and that is a really difficult area of a Formula 1 car to develop," Lowdon pointed out. "It's an area where know-how and intangible IP are really important, and we're not allowed to get that from anywhere else.

"We can't take someone else's brake duct design. People have in the past, but you're not allowed to do it [anymore]. You have to do that learning, and you have to do it in public as well with a few hundred million people watching.”

There's no place to hide when you're coming of age in public, when every practice session hiccup is caught on camera and every frustrated radio comment is gleefully aired. With the honeymoon period firmly over, Cadillac is being judged on performance now just like any other team.

It shouldn't want to have it any other way.

Cadillac is preparing to use in-house power units in 2029 - it is currently a Ferrari customer

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