The Miami Grand Prix is bound to be a huge weekend for the Cadillac Formula 1 operation and owner Dan Towriss. The team will be competing on home ground in only its fourth race weekend, and there is sure to be a lot of attention and publicity noise around the camp. It has already been announced that the cars will be running a special livery, with a nod to the stars and stripes.
Cadillac has had a tough start to the season so far, as was always going to be the case given the huge challenges involved in setting up an F1 team from scratch and even getting to the Melbourne grid. The cars were, inevitably, at the back of the field in Australia, but on the positive side, there was some progress through the first three race weekends. Both Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas made the checkered flag in China, which was something of an achievement given that the current cars are incredibly complex. Additionally, a lot of teams have had reliability issues this year—McLaren didn’t even get to start in Shanghai.
Cadillac repeated the feat with a second double finish in Japan. There was another landmark that weekend as both drivers qualified ahead of the troubled Aston Martins of Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll—something that we would never have imagined a few months ago.
Perez just managed to stay on the lead lap in the race, albeit helped by a safety car period closing up the field mid-event that made the result not representative of the overall performance. He eventually finished 27 seconds off the battling pair of Carlos Sainz and Franco Colapinto, having lost a second a lap to them from the safety car resumption to the flag.
That gap was also reflected in a 1.1-second margin between the fastest race lap of Perez, and those of Sainz and Colapinto. In other words, it was pretty clear by how much Cadillac was losing out to the Williams and the Alpine—and in F1, a second is a huge deficit.
“It was quite interesting,” Perez said after that race. “When I was following, I was racing at the time the Williams and the Alpine, I could see that they are not too far away. They're just able to consistently keep finding pace, and pace, and pace. I think it's clear that we need a second [of pace] now.”
However, the Mexican driver remained upbeat and confident that more progress was coming.
“I think I could see encouraging signs,” he said. “I think there is some work to do also with the deployment, I could see that they were deploying differently to us, a few of the teams – something to work on. But I think the main thing is that we need [downforce] load. And obviously we're bringing the upgrade to Miami, and it will be the biggest test for us.”
Like Cadillac, all teams are bringing major upgrade packages for Miami, and the long spring break has given everyone an extra opportunity to pour resources into development and getting new parts to the track. There’s a much bigger picture in Cadillac's case, with so many lessons learned in all areas of the team operation over those first three races, and much to improve.
“We obviously have to take that break wisely and use it properly as a whole team,” Perez noted. “In terms of track organization, factory organization. We had a new team, so we still see a lot of chaos around. So if we are able to put our systems together and obviously push extremely hard now, with three races, a lot of data, we know which areas we need to push on development. It's good that we have a bit of a break in a way, but the factory will be flat out completely. I expect that Cadillac will be the team that will be able to take the most out of that break, because for us, it's really important.”
The bottom line is that Cadillac had to get its car out on track as early as possible at all costs. It needed to run early—only Audi’s 2026 contender appeared before—because the team needed to get out on track and start gathering data. Being late for testing, like Williams and Aston Martin, was not an option.
Running on track early means that designs have to be signed off early, and parts manufactured early. And when you’re doing the whole thing for the first time, with unproven systems and production outsourced to suppliers, you have to leave even more time and be ultra conservative with deadlines.
In other words, Cadillac fielded a basic “launch car” package over those first three race weekends that was signed off well before those of other teams. And thus the step from that to what we see in Miami could potentially be a significant one, because V2 will represent months of learning in the wind tunnel, and reflect the lessons learned and data gathered in those early races.
Of course, the opposition is a moving target, and it remains to be seen by how much the team can close the gap to any of those ahead.
“We have to look at the lap times, and we can see that we need to develop,” said Perez. “And develop means out-developing our rivals, which is quite a hard thing to do in F1. But I believe that we have a good structure, the team is in a good place, and hopefully, when we start to develop, we can make significant steps. I think we are on target at the moment. It's still early days. We all want to see massive progress, and we want to start closing up the gap right now.”