- Sergio Perez says Cadillac has not scored a single point through most of its debut 2026 season, with the car stuck roughly 2.5 seconds off the pace.
- Perez blames the team’s reliance on third party parts and the absence of an established development process, both common growing pains for a brand new constructor.
- The former Red Bull race winner says he has nothing left to prove after watching his successors there manage only a handful of points between them.
A Winner Learning to Lose Quietly
Sergio Perez spent four seasons as Max Verstappen’s teammate at Red Bull, finishing runner up in the 2023 championship and winning five of his six career races in that car. This season, driving for a brand new team called Cadillac, he has not scored a single point. “It has been very tricky, it has been very difficult for us to develop,” Perez said, describing a car that has stayed roughly 2.5 seconds off the pace through a season of upgrades that have moved the result in millimeters rather than positions.
That gap has not closed even with real investment behind it. A major upgrade package arrived in Austria and barely moved the number. Aston Martin, one of the sport’s longer established midfield teams, passed Cadillac entirely after introducing a B spec chassis at Hungary, pushing the newest team on the grid further from the group it needs to catch.
No Playbook, No Shortcuts
Perez has been direct about why a team with real financial backing and recognizable drivers is still searching for its first point. As a new constructor, Cadillac buys some of its components from outside suppliers rather than building everything in house, a structural reality that limits how much control the team has over its own performance. “We don’t control much of it,” Perez said of those third party parts, a problem that established teams with decades of in house manufacturing simply do not face.
The bigger issue, in his telling, is institutional rather than mechanical. “We don’t have a clear process in place,” he said, contrasting Cadillac’s situation with rivals who already know how to turn wind tunnel data and track feedback into car upgrades on a predictable cycle. A new rules cycle made that disadvantage worse. Every team started from a blank page this year, but only the newest team on the grid had no accumulated experience to fall back on while building its first car under the new regulations. Perez said plainly that “no one in the team is happy with where we currently are,” a rare moment of a driver speaking for the mood inside the building rather than softening it for cameras.
Leaving Red Bull on His Own Terms This Time
Perez’s return to F1 carries real significance beyond Cadillac’s lap times, rooted in how his last chapter at Red Bull ended. He described that period as mentally demanding, built around constant adaptation and the difficulty of building confidence while driving alongside Verstappen. He has said he could not afford to end his career the way he left Red Bull, a motivation that shaped why he signed with a team that was always going to need a full season or more before it could compete.
When he announced the Cadillac deal alongside Valtteri Bottas, Perez described his own standing differently from how a winless season might suggest. “I don’t feel like there’s anything to prove,” he said, pointing to the struggles of the drivers who inherited his old Red Bull seat. Liam Lawson was demoted after only two races, at the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix, and Yuki Tsunoda managed just a handful of points across a dozen Red Bull appearances, with nothing added after the Emilia Romagna race in May. Perez’s point was not subtle: whatever happens at Cadillac, he has already shown more at Red Bull than the men who replaced him have managed in the time after him. Former Force India boss Otmar Szafnauer, who has worked with Perez before, said he “definitely has something to offer,” a case he made specifically for a new team that needed an experienced hand in the car while it found its footing.
Not the Only One Starting From Zero
Perez is not the only driver learning Cadillac’s car from scratch this season. Valtteri Bottas, the other half of the team’s experienced driver pairing, left Mercedes and Sauber with ten grand prix wins and more than a decade of front running experience, only to spend 2026 chasing the same 2.5 second gap Perez describes. Two drivers who combined for well over a hundred grand prix starts before this season arrived at the same conclusion independently: the car, not the talent behind the wheel, is the limiting factor.
That shared experience changes how Cadillac’s season gets read inside the paddock. A single struggling driver invites questions about whether he still belongs on the grid. Two veterans with genuine race winning resumes posting the same results points the conversation toward the machine and the organization building it, which lines up exactly with what Perez has argued in every interview he has given on the subject. Formula 1 has watched new teams struggle before, from Haas needing years to establish itself after joining the grid to earlier manufacturer entries that took multiple seasons to find turnaround form, and Cadillac’s winless start fits a pattern the sport has seen more than once from a brand new constructor building a car under an unfamiliar rulebook with no inherited data to lean on.
Building Toward 2027 While the Clock Runs on 2026
Cadillac’s own plan treats this season as a foundation rather than a target. The team has more upgrades planned for the second half of 2026, aimed less at closing the gap this year than at setting up a real step forward in 2027, when the sport’s current teams will have a full season of data on the new regulations and Cadillac hopes to have caught up on the basics everyone else already knows. That is a difficult sell to fans watching a team with the Cadillac name and real backing finish races outside the points, but it matches how Perez has talked about his own return: a multi year rebuild, not a quick fix. General Motors did not attach its Cadillac badge to a Formula 1 team expecting instant results, and the patient, process driven, shortcut allergic way Perez talks about the project suggests he signed up for exactly this kind of season rather than stumbling into it unaware without any sense of what a brand new constructor actually needed from its lead driver.
For a driver who said this comeback was “more of a coming back to enjoy the sport” than a mission to reclaim lost status, a winless season tests that description in ways a midfield finish never would. Perez has absorbed the kind of season that would have been a crisis at Red Bull and described it with something closer to patience, pointing at supplier contracts and development processes rather than at himself. Whether that patience holds through a second straight season without a point will say more about Cadillac’s project, and about how Perez wants to be remembered, than anything that happened in his six years at Red Bull.
Perez knows better than most drivers on the grid how quickly patience inside a team can run out. He watched it happen to himself at Red Bull, where results that once looked respectable started reading as liabilities the moment the team needed every point it could get. Signing with a new constructor that openly describes this season as groundwork rather than competition buys him something Red Bull stopped offering near the end, room to be part of a process instead of a verdict on it. Whether Cadillac repays that patience with real progress in 2027 will decide if this comeback becomes the second act Perez wants or just a longer, gentler version of the ending he was trying to avoid. Either way, he has already made clear he would rather lose slowly while building something than lose quickly while defending a seat that was never going to be his for long. That is the bet behind every quote he has given about this season, and it is the bet Cadillac is now making right alongside him.
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