- Valtteri Bottas was called before Baku stewards for overtaking under yellow flags in Friday practice, then cleared entirely once telemetry showed he could not have reacted any faster.
- The clearance was one of the only clean outcomes of a season in which Cadillac, F1’s newest team, has yet to score a single championship point.
- Bottas has not finished a race in over four months, and reports already link his teammate’s seat, and possibly his own, to Colton Herta.
Summoned to the Stewards, Cleared in an Instant That Wasn’t His Fault
Valtteri Bottas had barely climbed out of his Cadillac after Friday practice in Baku when the summons arrived: report to the stewards at 1:50 p.m. local time to explain overtaking Alex Albon’s Williams between Turns 6 and 7 under yellow flag conditions. For a team that has spent the season searching for any kind of positive headline, a stewards investigation is rarely welcome, whatever the outcome. This time, the outcome favored him. Telemetry showed Bottas traveling at roughly 240 kilometers per hour with a 120 kilometer per hour speed difference to Albon’s car when the yellow flag appeared, leaving him almost no window to react. The stewards’ written verdict put it plainly: “Car 77 could not reasonably have avoided completing the overtake.” No penalty followed.
It was a clean result in a season that has offered Bottas almost nothing else. He finished the Friday session 22nd and last, more than three and a half seconds off the pace set by George Russell. His teammate, Sergio Perez, fared only marginally better in 17th. Baku’s opening practice turned into a showcase of Cadillac’s struggles laid bare next to the sport’s front-runners, on a weekend that briefly offered the team a small piece of good news before the timing screens reminded everyone why that news mattered so little against everything else.
A Champion’s Runner-Up Now Racing for Relevance
The distance between where Bottas once stood in Formula 1 and where he stands now is difficult to overstate. He spent five seasons at Mercedes alongside Lewis Hamilton, winning ten Grands Prix and finishing as championship runner-up in both 2019 and 2020, a genuine title threat in one of the most dominant stretches any team has ever produced. When that seat disappeared, he rebuilt a career at Alfa Romeo and Sauber through 2022 to 2024, keeping his name relevant in a sport that discards experienced drivers quickly once the wins stop coming. Cadillac’s arrival as Formula 1’s newest team for 2026 offered him something rare at 36: a fresh project, built from nothing, with his name attached to it from the start.
Nine months later, that fresh project has yet to deliver a single championship point. Cadillac sits at the back of the constructors’ table, and Bottas has not completed a race in the four months following the Canadian Grand Prix, a run of finishes wrecked by everything from mechanical failures to strategy errors to, in Austria, a front brake fire severe enough that he described watching flames spread across his own car in real time. “It was really sudden, unexpected,” Bottas said afterward. “It was actually Lap 2 going into Turn 4, I could start to smell some smoke, see some smoke and then suddenly everything was on fire, front brakes on fire.”
“We Cannot Have These Sort of Issues”
Perez, racing his way back into Formula 1 after his own difficult exit from Red Bull, has not hidden his frustration with the pattern either. Following the Austrian Grand Prix, where his own race also ended early, he called for accountability inside the team rather than patience alone. “It’s been a very frustrating weekend for the whole team to have these issues,” Perez said. “I expect a massive internal discussion on our processes and how we are doing things because we have to step up because we cannot have these sort of issues.” Bottas, for his part, struck a similar note of cautious hope mixed with plain fatigue. “Difficult weekend, a lot of issues,” he said. “Again, a weekend to learn from and just got to act on these issues and fix them. It’s a shame because I thought we made the car a bit quicker but we’ve got to start finishing races.”
What makes the run of results harder to parse is that both drivers keep describing a car that feels faster underneath them than the results show. Cadillac was built around Bottas and Perez specifically for their experience, hired to provide stability while a brand-new organization worked out how a Formula 1 team actually operates on a race weekend, from pit strategy to reliability protocols. A first-year team failing to score points is not itself remarkable in Formula 1’s history. A first-year team failing to score points while employing two drivers with a combined 542 Grand Prix starts and 12 race wins between them is a different kind of story, one that raises questions about the car and the organization rather than the men driving it.
The Herta Question Won’t Go Away
That distinction has not stopped speculation about Bottas’s own seat from creeping into the conversation, five races into a season built to run considerably longer than that. Colton Herta’s name keeps surfacing as a potential alternative, part of the American driver’s broader push toward a Formula 1 seat through Cadillac’s own free practice sessions, even as he continues chasing the super license points that would make such a move possible. Reporting on the situation has generally cautioned against reading too much into early scrutiny of either driver, noting that judging a brand-new team and its drivers after five races risks mistaking growing pains for individual failure. Rushing a driver change while an organization is still working out its own fundamentals could easily prove counterproductive, trading away the experience Cadillac hired Bottas and Perez to provide in the first place.
Bottas has weathered speculation about his future before. He did it at Mercedes as Hamilton’s teammate, at Alfa Romeo as younger prospects circled, and now at Cadillac as the team searches for anyone or anything to blame for a pointless season. What separates this stretch is the absence of a clear villain in the story. There is no obvious mistake to point to, no single bad decision that explains nine months without a finish that counted. Just a new team still learning how to keep a car together for a full race distance, and a 36-year-old former championship contender doing what he has always done through difficult stretches: showing up, explaining the failures plainly to reporters who ask, and getting back in the car the following weekend.
What a Debut Season Was Supposed to Look Like
Cadillac arrived in Formula 1 this year as the sport’s eleventh team, backed by General Motors and years of political maneuvering to secure a grid spot other manufacturers fought to keep closed. The expectation inside the paddock was never that a brand-new operation would fight for podiums in its first season. Teams that join Formula 1 from scratch typically spend years scoring the occasional point before threatening the midfield in earnest. What makes this season sting is narrower than the results themselves: a team with two former Grand Prix winners in the cockpit, unable to convert a car both drivers describe as competitive into a single finish that counts.
A Clean Verdict That Changes Nothing
The Baku stewards’ decision cleared Bottas of any wrongdoing within minutes of the request being issued, a small procedural victory that will not appear anywhere near the championship table. Cadillac remains without a point. Bottas remains without a finish for a fifth straight month. And the paddock chatter about his future, however prematurely reported, remains exactly where it was before the stewards ever called his name. For a driver who once fought Hamilton for a world title, Baku offered a strange kind of relief: proof that at least one thing that went wrong this weekend truly was not his fault. The rest of the season still is not offering him that same comfort.
Sources:
- https://www.planetf1.com/news/fia-valtteri-bottas-azerbaijan-grand-prix-2026-investigation
- https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/we-cannot-have-these-sort-of-issues-perez-and-bottas-reflect-on-cadillacs-problems-in-austrian-gp.3Bj6T1vNggLdhrU1MCAW8G
- https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/valtteri-bottas-facing-early-pressure-173554173.html
- https://www.crash.net/f1/results/1105168/1/2026-f1-azerbaijan-grand-prix-full-thursday-practice-results-baku
