- Valtteri Bottas, 37, says he knows the terms of his Cadillac contract and that “that’s all OK” for 2027, per Motorsport.com.
- Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski declined to say whether Bottas or Sergio Perez hold valid contracts for next season.
- Cadillac then announced a new Perez deal “until at least 2029” and has announced nothing for Bottas.
A Finn Who Knows His Terms, a Team That Will Not Say
Asked whether Cadillac had given him any reassurance for 2027, Bottas pointed to his signing. “Last year when I signed, I know the terms, so that’s all OK,” the 264-race veteran said.
Then the team put out a release about his teammate. Perez, 36, has a new contract “until at least 2029”, and Cadillac announced it on the eve of his home Mexican Grand Prix. For the other car, Cadillac has announced nothing.
Bottas has a contract he says he understands, a team principal who will not discuss it, and a teammate with a deal through 2029. Nothing from the team says anything about Bottas’s future, either way.
Budkowski’s Careful Silence
Budkowski has run Cadillac for two and a half months, and he gave nothing away in the Friday press conference at the United States Grand Prix. Asked whether a particular driver might be a candidate for a reserve role, he gave a general answer about the driver market.
“As a team principal, and I’m sure it’s the same with my colleagues, you’re getting calls and contacts from every driver or driver manager that is on the market,” he said. “I’m not going to say who it is or who it isn’t.”
Pressed on whether Bottas and Perez each held a valid contract for 2027, the Pole refused again. “This is the last place I would comment on driver contracts,” Budkowski said, adding that announcements come “by official releases from the team when the time is right.” On the subject of line-ups, he said “my marketing and communications department would kill me if I did that.”
Both drivers joined Cadillac on “multi-year” contracts, and those deals were not thought to go beyond 2027. It is unclear what conditions, if any, trigger a 2027 extension for either of them.
Pressed on Budkowski’s answers, Bottas said he was unaware of them and unbothered. Asked whether any scenario existed in which he would not race for Cadillac in 2027 while holding a contract, he pondered it. “I mean, it is Formula 1. If cows could fly, you know.” He added that “anything can always happen in this sport.” Then he said the team seems happy with what it gets from him.
Nine Retirements and an Engine That Sounded Wrong
Sunday’s race in Austin gave Bottas more to talk about. He retired at the Circuit of the Americas, his ninth retirement of the season. Eight of the nine came from technical problems, and the Austin stop was a suspected power-unit failure.
Nine is a surprisingly high number for a driver whose DNF rate before 2026 was 11%.
“It’s always disappointing not to finish, but it didn’t sound great from the engine side, like physically,” he said.
He described a team that still struggles to understand its own problems. “I would say it’s impossible to get a read on a year like this with so many issues,” Bottas said. “And the problem is sometimes we don’t quite understand them. So it’s really still a steep learning curve to go.”
He also pointed to the work nobody sees from the grandstands. “There’s been lots of things in the background that maybe not everyone sees, like the brake management, the amount of having to deal with that and all these things,” he said.
The race itself offered a small lift. Both Cadillacs mingled with the Aston Martins and Williams for a while before falling back. Perez finished about 20 seconds behind Fernando Alonso, Alexander Albon and Carlos Sainz, which marked an improvement for the team, and Bottas was only five seconds behind Perez when he stopped. “It was at times quite positive to see that we were pretty close to some other cars on pace,” Bottas said.
Neither Cadillac driver has scored a point in 2026. Perez finished 10th on the road at Monaco and lost the result to a post-race time penalty.
Perez Gets His Extension
The Perez announcement lands on a career with its own milestone attached. He will make his 300th Formula 1 start at the Mexican Grand Prix this weekend, the seventh driver to reach the mark. If he runs the new deal in full, he is on course to pass Jenson Button, Michael Schumacher, Rubens Barrichello and Kimi Raikkonen and take third on the all-time starts list, behind only Alonso and Lewis Hamilton. The final year of the contract, 2029, would be his 18th season in F1, at age 39.
Cadillac CEO Dan Towriss welcomed the signing. “Securing Checo’s talent and leadership gives us the continuity and commitment we need to build on the strong foundation established in our first year,” he said.
The comparison between the two drivers sits under all of this. Perez has an edge over Bottas, marginal in qualifying and larger in race pace. Bottas has an answer. A new team has teething problems, he says, and it is also the first year of a very particular new set of regulations, so the two sides of the garage have not had consistent machinery, and that makes a fair comparison hard.
Perez had his own complaint after Austin. He felt hindered by his strategy and said the timing of the blue flags after his pit stop meant “we lost a lot of race time.”
What Cadillac Bought in August 2025
The signing that started all of this came on Aug. 26, 2025. Cadillac named Bottas and Perez as the drivers for its debut season, both on multi-year deals, and both 35 years old. Neither had a race seat at the time. Sauber had replaced Bottas with Gabriel Bortoleto, and Red Bull had dropped Perez mid-contract in favor of Liam Lawson, who was then replaced by Yuki Tsunoda. Between them, the pair had 16 grand prix wins and 527 starts.
The résumés explained the choice. Bottas had finished second in the world championship in 2019 and 2020 alongside Hamilton at Mercedes, and he helped the team win the constructors’ title every year from 2017 to 2021. Perez had finished second in 2023 alongside Max Verstappen at Red Bull, and he helped that team to the constructors’ title in 2022 and 2023.
Towriss said at the time that the experience was the point. “We believe their experience, their leadership and their technical acumen really are what we need,” he said. Experience in Formula 1, he said, “carried the day” over younger names. Bottas spoke of Cadillac as “ambitious but also grounded” and said “it’s not every day that you get a chance to be part of something being built from the ground up.”
Fourteen months later, one of those two drivers has a contract that runs to 2029. The other has a statement that says he knows his terms.
Mexico Offers a Test in the Heat
The next chance for Bottas to answer on the track is the Mexican Grand Prix, which runs from Friday to Sunday. At Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, Cadillac’s lack of downforce should not hold it back to the same extent as in Austin. The forecast works the other way. Warm temperatures, around 26C, and sunshine were forecast for qualifying and the race as of Tuesday.
Bottas knows what the heat means for his car. In Austin he credited the cloud cover for part of the improvement. “It was a bit cooler today, we know we are not great when it’s high temperatures, so that helped a bit,” he said. He still sees a chance. “Mexico should be hopefully a bit better for us,” Bottas said.
Perez will arrive at home with a long contract and a milestone start. Bottas will arrive with eight technical retirements behind him and a contract he calls fine. Budkowski said driver news comes by official release when the time is right. One of the two has now had his.
