Cadillac’s burning start to the season
- Kavi Khandelwal
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Cadillac unveiled its first Formula One car during a Super Bowl commercial. An American brand, on the world’s biggest advertising stage, announced itself to a sport that had spent years courting American audiences. It was bold, deliberate, and as much a statement of commercial identity as a motorsport announcement.
Eight races in, Cadillac sits at the bottom of the constructors’ championship without a single point to its name. Two cars retired in Austria within five laps, both on fire. The gap between the story Cadillac was expected to be and the sport that greeted it is the defining feature of its debut season.
The foundation
The narrative around Cadillac’s entry was always carefully managed. Unlike purely customer-powered teams, Cadillac arrived with manufacturer intent – factory involvement, stability, technical depth, and a longer planning horizon.
The team points to its senior hires: Pat Symonds as chief technical officer, Nick Chester as technical director, Xavi Marcos as chief race engineer – alumni of championship-winning programmes brought in to build something serious.
General Motors (GM) paid an expansion fee of $450 million, over twice the original asking price. This was more than just a vanity project. It was supposed to be the blueprint for how a new team does it right.
The reality is that Cadillac is a Ferrari customer team without the factory relationship that makes it work. The works Ferrari team gets first access to the latest specification power unit, benefitting from the closest possible integration between chassis and power unit development.
It is a collaboration that customer teams cannot replicate.
Lewis Hamilton has already acknowledged that the Ferrari power unit is down on power compared to the class-leading Mercedes. Cadillac is running a customer version of a unit that is already behind. Its own GM engine does not arrive until 2029. Until then, it is building a factory team identity on borrowed infrastructure.
That contradiction runs through the season at a structural level. The MAC-26 has brought updates to every race. The Austria package involved substantial changes to the sidepod geometry – a much clearer undercut that exposes more of the floor edge and allows air a cleaner path towards the diffuser. Internal repackaging also repositioned cooling louvres to the top of the sidepod to better extract radiator heat.
The brake fires that have plagued Cadillac since Monaco are a thermal management problem – and a specifically structural one. In the 2026 regulations, the MGU-K is nearly three times more powerful than its predecessor, delivering 350 kW to the rear wheels and recovering energy at a greatly increased rate under braking.
That shift places enormous, unprecedented demands on the brake cooling architecture. For established teams with seasons of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) data and real-world correlation behind their brake duct designs, managing that heat envelope is difficult.
For a team in its first year, building its cooling solution from scratch without the accumulated reference points to draw on, it is a categorically different challenge.
Teams try to optimise airflow through the wheel rims and around the brakes to reduce the heat-sink effect, shielding the tyre away from a build-up of hot air. One available avenue is in the design of the wheel rims and the brake cooling system itself.
When that system is undersized or poorly optimised for a specific circuit’s demands, the consequences come quickly. Valtteri Bottas radioed in a brake fire on lap 2 of the Austrian Grand Prix. Sergio Pérez reported smoke in the cockpit on lap five.
The same failure mode, both cars within the distance it takes most drivers to find their rhythm.
What makes this particularly acute is the resource dimension. Both Pérez and Bottas have already used two ICEs, two turbochargers, two MGU-Ks and two energy stores through just eight rounds of a 22-race season.
With four ICEs and four turbochargers permitted across the full year, and three MGU-Ks and energy stores allowed in total, the margin for error is shrinking race by race. Every reliability failure – every fire retirement, every electrical fault, every mechanical DNF – is not just a lost result.
It is a component burned through, a penalty inching closer on a car that is already qualifying 19th and 20th. Cadillac cannot afford a grid penalty on top of everything else.
The number twos
The driver lineup was supposed to provide the experience that would buy the team time. Bottas and Pérez combined for 16 race wins and over 500 race starts.
Team principal Graeme Lowdon framed their feedback as one of the team’s core structural advantages: “These guys are so experienced with multiple different teams, working with multiple different engineers and different cars, different power units, different chassis. We’re not wasting any time at all. We’re getting super accurate, thoughtful and valuable feedback straight away.”
What the narrative glossed over is what both drivers actually are: the definitive number twos of the hybrid era’s most dominant teams. Bottas spent five seasons at Mercedes, winning ten races, and was still the number two to Lewis Hamilton, called a “sensational wingman” by his own team principal in a moment he later said, “hurts.”
He wrote that the situation “almost made me walk away from the sport.”
Pérez spent four years at Red Bull as the clear number two to Max Verstappen, in a car fundamentally designed for another driver, in an environment that, by the end, felt complicated and toxic.
Both men came to Cadillac specifically to escape that dynamic – to lead rather than follow, to have a team built around them. What they have found instead is that leading a team and leading a competitive car are different things.
The feedback they provide is valuable. Lowdon is right about that. But there is a ceiling on what experienced feedback can extract from a car that retires before the end of lap five. Bottas and Pérez are not number twos here. They are simply stuck.
The reckoning
CEO Dan Towriss was explicit before the season began: points were not the target. “I want to look at beating teams, beating cars on track. How many cars can we pass in year one in moving up the grid?”
On the development metric alone, the trajectory is real – from 5.205% off Mercedes at the start of the year to 3.721% by Austria, closing in on Williams and Haas.
But a gap that closes in qualifying means nothing in a race you do not finish. Three consecutive race weekends compromised by the same unresolved thermal failure; upgrades arriving at circuits without the foundational reliability to support them; component allocations eroding through a season that still has 14 rounds to run.
The Super Bowl slot announced a team ready to take on the sport. The sport, as it tends to do, has asked for proof – and right now the MAC-26 keeps catching fire before it can provide it.
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