Cadillac spent the first half of 2026 doing exactly what a new Formula 1 team is supposed to do: finding lap time in bulk and dragging itself off the back row. Then it stopped. The Sergio Perez Cadillac assessment delivered after the Dutch Grand Prix is that the American team’s recent form has flatlined at the worst possible moment — and that the drivers know it.
“On everything, I think the last few races have been a disappointment,” Perez told Formula 1’s Beyond the Grid podcast, in comments reported by Motorsport.com. “There’s a lot of disappointment because we haven’t been developing. We haven’t been improving. Us being a new team, this is what we should be doing, like every time. So I felt like there was a bit of a stalling in the last few races.”
Why the Sergio Perez Cadillac frustration is about more than one bad weekend
The context matters. Cadillac entered the sport this year as the grid’s eleventh team, running Ferrari power, with Perez and Valtteri Bottas — a pairing chosen precisely because neither man needed teaching how a modern F1 weekend works. In the opening months that experience showed. The team developed hard enough to climb clear of a struggling Aston Martin and avoid the wooden spoon, which for a first-year entry in the most complex regulation reset in a generation was a respectable return.
That advantage has since evaporated, and not only because Cadillac slowed down. Aston Martin brought aerodynamic upgrades in Hungary and again in the Netherlands, and Honda has kept chasing power on its side of the garage. The Silverstone team has moved; Cadillac has not.
Perez put a number on the shortfall, and it is not a small one. He reckons Cadillac has found roughly a second of lap time this season against an internal target of about two. “I don’t think we have improved as much as we hoped for,” he said. “[We have found] I don’t know, a second? But probably we were looking for two seconds.” A missing second, in a field this compressed, is the difference between Q1 elimination and a genuine fight with Williams, Haas and Aston Martin.
The view from the car in front
What sharpens the point is how rivals now use Cadillac as a yardstick. Williams has slid badly since the early rounds, and after Zandvoort Carlos Sainz reached for the bluntest available measure of where his own team sits. “We are only quicker than Cadillac at the moment,” he said, in an assessment of Williams’ collapse down the order. “You saw the Astons in race pace, they are a different league right now.”
Being the floor of the grid is survivable in a debut season. Being the floor while the development curve goes flat is the part that should worry Cadillac, because the 2026 rules are new enough that the teams learning fastest will keep pulling away through 2027.
A first year that keeps rewriting itself
None of this has happened in a calm environment. Cadillac changed team principal earlier this month, a call we examined in why the switch came so soon, and has since had to deny reports that the operation was up for sale. The on-track version of the same story played out in Austria, where an upgrade package failed to lift either car off the back row.
Perez, to his credit, is not writing the project off. He argues Cadillac is “not that far” from the established midfield, and that recovering the missing second would change the team’s competitive picture entirely. He also says the plateau forced an internal review of how the team works — which, for a Formula 1 operation barely eight months old, may prove more valuable than any single aero package.
The Italian Grand Prix at Monza will offer a fairly brutal read on whether that review has landed. Ferrari power on Ferrari’s home straight is the sort of stage a new team wants; Cadillac needs to arrive with something more than good intentions.
