The Red Bull lesson Cadillac has learned with its F1 driver picks Bottas and Perez

Everyone has an opinion. It can actually be quite wearing as they come at you from everywhere – a sensation Cadillac Formula 1 team principal Graeme Lowdon and his boss, TWG Motorsports CEO Dan Towriss, no doubt felt as they mopped their fevered brows after announcing their F1 drivers for 2026.

Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez are safe-ish choices. How safe depends on your perspective. There are those who say the Cadillac driver line-up is merely uninspiring, and driven too much by commercial considerations such as the Latin American car market. And of course there has been the usual chest-beating about all those young drivers being denied opportunities by the fossils.

Certainly the opinionati have been hard at it. “Experience doesn’t mean you’re quick or great,” was Jacques Villeneuve’s hot take. “Bottas won against Lewis, was very active in moving the Mercedes car forward. It was hard at Sauber. I think he just lost interest. So if you take the Bottas of Mercedes, great, and he has image. Perez comes with cash as well.”

Cadillac’s leaders insist they have done their due diligence, particularly on Perez, so the suggestion that he got the nod primarily because he arrives with a bag of pesos seems churlish. But Perez’s reputation underwent rapid unscheduled disassembly last year and he has to take some responsibility for crumbling under pressure.

Him flying off the circuit became so frequent as to be viewed as a matter of if, not when. Mid-way through Q1 at the British Grand Prix last year, a colleague turned to me and said, “Isn’t it about time Perez binned it and brought out a red flag?” Barely had we returned our gaze to the screens than it came to pass.

Both drivers feel they have unfinished business in F1, especially Perez, who wants to leave on his own terms rather than being ushered out of the door in favour of someone else who ends up failing to do a better job. Bottas, as current employer Toto Wolff admits, had the misfortune to be racing a Mercedes alongside Lewis Hamilton in his pomp, when he was always going to become the de facto number two. Wolff probably wouldn’t so readily admit that was part of the reason for hiring Bottas in the first place: after the rancour between Hamilton and Nico Rosberg, Mercedes needed a driver who would play nicely.

For different reasons, Bottas and Perez have reputations to restore as they both prepare to return to F1 with Cadillac

Photo by: Dan Istitene / Getty Images

Bottas has a prominent and decently paid job as a reserve driver, but he’s still hungry to race. He’s clearly not 100% content with loafing around in full team kit waiting for one of the race drivers to come down with “fish poisoning”, as Wolff puts it.

Alongside the old cliches about experienced drivers helping to guide development, you have to ask whether Cadillac needs superstars right now. When Red Bull bought Jaguar Racing in the winter of 2004, it had a mandate to bring on young talent through its own driver-development programme, but it also recruited David Coulthard. At the time, DC was about to turn 34 and somewhat bruised by McLaren’s decision to ‘let him go’ in favour of Juan Pablo Montoya.

As Red Bull discovered in those early years, when you’re building a team and finding your way with a new car, you need drivers whom you can leave alone

Coulthard has often said that he would have quit F1 rather than drive for Jaguar, but he was sold on Red Bull’s energy and ambition. And it was he who ultimately brokered Adrian Newey’s transfer from McLaren as technical director, which set the team on the path to glory. In the first two seasons Coulthard was the one who set the standards while a rather unfortunate cast of young hopefuls came and went: Christian Klien, Vitantonio Liuzzi, Robert Doornbos. Arguably Red Bull only became a serious proposition when the team partnered Coulthard with the similarly venerable Mark Webber in the first Newey-designed car, in 2007.

It’s known that Cadillac had several other drivers under consideration, including Zhou Guanyu, Franco Colapinto, Felipe Drugovich, Jack Doohan, Frederik Vesti and Jak Crawford. Only one of them has had meaningfully long F1 experience, one has already been dropped by their team for underperforming, another’s confidence has unravelled as this season has progressed, and the rest have but a handful of FP1 sessions to their names.

As Red Bull discovered in those early years, when you’re building a team and finding your way with a new car, you need drivers whom you can leave alone because they know what they’re doing.

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Coulthard's success in Red Bull's early days appears to be a feat Cadillac is aiming to repeat with Bottas and Perez

Photo by: Red Bull Racing