Pérez lashes out to his team: “We need to stop having issues”
- Bo Helmus
- 33 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Written by Bo Helmus
At the start of the 2026 Formula One season, all eyes are set on Cadillac. This brand new team brings experienced drivers in the hopes of scoring some decent results. In order to do that, they need as much data as possible. However, the cars are drastically behind on track time.
In the first practice session, Sergio Pérez set the 20th time with 14 laps, his teammate Valtteri Bottas was 17th and drove 24 laps. In the second practice session, Pérez came out of his garage, drove two laps and returned to not come out again. Bottas drove 28 laps and set the 19th time. Both drivers experienced their mirrors falling out in the sessions.
The Mexican driver commented on his day: “Unfortunately, we had too many issues out there. We couldn't get any long runs in, which was important. That was today’s main thing, really, not getting enough running. Hopefully tomorrow it will be more straightforward. Hopefully we can try the tyres and see what we have.”
He can’t tell what went wrong in FP2: “I don’t know what happened there in the end. It seems like an issue with the engine. So hopefully that doesn’t put us on the back foot for tomorrow. Hopefully, we will have a clean FP3 because we really need some data.”
A clean FP3 was far from what the Cadillac drivers got on Saturday. Red flags dominated the session and resulted in 19th and 20th place for Bottas and Pérez, respectively. The Mexican driver did get 20 laps in, but that is not nearly enough to make up for the missed time on Friday. The Fin drove 12 laps.
A new team can’t be expected to fight for the title from the get-go, but a big name like Cadillac is surely expected to perform better than to be the second-to-last car on the grid. Pérez admits: “It’s pretty new. For now it’s just really important to be able to progress through and to stop having these little issues that are costing us a lot of track time.”
Team principal Graeme Lowdon is slightly more satisfied with the team’s results so far: “I think on a project like this, it’s very easy to see Melbourne as the end objective, and it’s not. Obviously, it’s our first ever Grand Prix for Cadillac Formula 1 Team, so this isn’t our objective. Our objective is to start racing, and that’s what it felt like for me. It was the start of a very, very, very long journey.”
Let’s hope that the team finds the solutions to these issues and scores some proper results in their debut race.
