- Mercedes reserve driver Fred Vesti says he has his eyes on Cadillac’s 2027 seat, per The Race.
- He finished third in Mexico City FP1 in George Russell’s car, 0.074 seconds behind Kimi Antonelli.
- Colton Herta will run a sixth Friday session for Cadillac in Brazil, so the Bottas or Herta decision stays open.
The Third Driver Who Says He Is Ready For A Race Seat
George Russell gave up his car for an hour in Mexico City, and Fred Vesti made it count. Given a soft-tire run to show his pace, Vesti finished FP1 third, 0.074 seconds slower than Antonelli, F1’s new world champion.
He said afterward what he wants next. “The timing couldn’t be better,” Vesti said. “There are discussions about a seat and I’ve got my eyes on that [Cadillac] seat. I believe I would be very, very good in that car”
Cadillac has not made a final 2027 driver decision. The seat in question sits beside Sergio Perez, and Vesti wants it while Valtteri Bottas and Colton Herta are also candidates. Vesti is 24, joined the Mercedes academy in 2021, and has made seven F1 practice appearances without once starting a Grand Prix. He wants that to change.
One Hour in George Russell’s Car
Mercedes, with Russell’s blessing, let Vesti push on the soft tires to show his potential. Some of his earlier outings had focused on development work.
Bradley Lord, Mercedes’ deputy team principal, called it the “most impressive” of Vesti’s seven F1 practice outings. Russell, who has spoken this season about how Mercedes’ struggles are landing on him, went further in public. “He did a really good job, I know he’s really fighting hard to be in with a shot potentially of the Cadillac seat and I think he deserves his chance,” Russell said. He added that Vesti had taken the brunt of the work in most of his FP1 sessions without getting performance runs, and told the team he wanted him to get a chance to show what he could do. “That’s the least that we could do,” Russell said.
The soft tires gave Vesti an improvement of 1.1 seconds over his best lap on the hards, more than the team had estimated. His own list of what went missing is short. He used first gear through Turn 16, on the way out of the stadium section, and thinks second was right. That gear choice explains part of the gap to Antonelli. On his second soft-tire lap he set personal bests in sectors two and three, which put his theoretical lap just 0.051 seconds off Antonelli. Straight after the session he asked Russell for FP2 to polish the lap.
The car was not easy. The latest Mercedes is more demanding than its predecessor in some corners, Vesti said, and he was sideways several times on the soft lap. He also ran aerodynamic tests on the hard tires, work that helps the team understand its upgraded car.
Vesti pointed to the trust. A driver giving up his seat for a rookie is never simple, he said, and having both Russell and the team back him with a performance run showed him how far he has come inside the squad.
The Man Who Drove the 2026 Car Before It Existed
Mercedes began developing its 2026 car at the end of 2024, Vesti said, while the team still had a title to chase in 2025. The car lived in the simulator first, and Vesti spent his days driving it there. “I’ve sort of been leading that development in the simulator,” he said. He then watched it come alive in testing, learned what sort of personality it had, and carried what he learned back to Brackley.
The numbers behind that work are his own estimate. He puts his time in the Mercedes simulator at around 300 days across five years, with 150 to 200 laps on each of those days. That adds up to more than 50,000 laps. He has run every track on the calendar, race starts, race running and qualifying, and says he feels as if he has driven them all for real.
He has also watched Mercedes win with the car he helped shape. Seeing Antonelli and Russell win races means a lot to him, Vesti said, and he calls it rare for a reserve driver to care so much about what happens on Sunday. He still wants to be out there himself, and he says so plainly.
He rejects the label of rookie inside the team. “There’s a reason I’m called third driver,” he said. Two weeks before the interview he ran a Pirelli test, the final review of the 2027 tires, and he counts that kind of key assignment as proof of a level beyond rookie.
The F2 Class That Left Him Behind
Vesti finished second in the 2023 F2 championship, 11 points behind Theo Pourchaire. He won six races that year to four for Ollie Bearman, his teammate at Prema. His junior record was solid rather than the kind that forces an F1 promotion, in the mold of Charles Leclerc or Oscar Piastri, but he routinely matched and beat drivers now in F1, including Bearman, Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar.
No realistic opening appeared for him. Four drivers he raced in F2 in 2023 reached F1 first: Lawson, Jack Doohan, Hadjar and Bearman. Russell, who won the F2 title in 2018, helped Vesti in that category, and Vesti raced there in 2022 and 2023.
He talks about that gap with two feelings at once. “It’s a mixed feeling of frustration that there hasn’t been a seat for me yet, given my F2 campaign and the level I’ve shown, but equally it’s also a motivation that I know that these guys have made it,” Vesti said. He pointed to Bearman and Antonelli, who are both doing amazing in F1, and says that gives him trust there is no reason he would not be right at their level once he gets there.
Others in his position gave up in year one, year two or year three, he said. He will not. “I have absolutely no reason to give up,” Vesti said. What he hears from Mercedes and from people elsewhere in F1 tells him to keep giving everything and trust that a seat could appear.
Where the Cadillac Seat Stands
Vesti already works for Cadillac. He has been part of its top-class line-up in the IMSA SportsCar Championship for two years. Even so, he says people misread him. “F1 is the only thing I care about. F1 is the only place I want to be, and everything I do on the side is for me to be prepared for Formula 1.”
His pitch to the team is direct. He says his insider knowledge of a championship-leading Mercedes can help smaller teams take a step forward. “It’s very clear that I have a knowledge bank bigger than most in Formula 1,” Vesti said. He adds that he has been a key part of how Mercedes got to where it is and knows how that happened. On the stopwatch, he sees no question. “Speed and racecraft, I don’t think is a question. I feel ready, and I’m so hungry to get on the grid.”
The competition is real. Herta, Cadillac’s 26-year-old test driver, needs 40 points for an FIA superlicence. Cadillac thought he reached that mark in Mexico, then learned he was one point short after confusion over his IndyCar results. His car broke down at Monza, which left him short of the 100 kilometer threshold a session needs to award a point. At Interlagos, 24 laps will meet it.
So Herta will drive Perez’s car in Brazil FP1, his sixth Friday session of the season. Teams only have to run a rookie in four FP1 sessions a year. The extra outing lets Cadillac keep its options open as it considers a second year for incumbent Valtteri Bottas or a 2027 debut for Herta. Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski said of Herta: “His growth in the car across his sessions has been impressive, and his feedback remains invaluable to our 2027 development program.”
Bottas’s own Mexico weekend ended with a high-speed crash in the Grand Prix after a sudden front-left suspension failure. Budkowski said the team has implemented mitigations to avoid a repeat. Perez, who headed into start number 300 at home in Mexico City, will hand his car to Herta for that Brazil session.
A Seat With No Answer Yet
Brazil is the next stage. The Sao Paulo Grand Prix weekend runs November 6 to 8, and FP1 on Friday starts at 3:30pm GMT. Mercedes can clinch the constructors’ title in Brazil.
Vesti arrives at that weekend with an hour of speed on the record, a mountain of simulator laps by his own count, a public endorsement from the driver whose car he borrowed, and a stated wish. He has no offer, and nothing he has said claims one. What he has is a Friday in Mexico City when a team trusted him with a soft-tire run, and a Cadillac decision that nobody has made yet.
If Cadillac keeps waiting, Vesti has made his case on the record: F1 is the only place he wants to be.
