Cadillac faces “biggest challenge” to close F1 gap, says Sergio Perez

If F1's 11th team Cadillac aimed for a respectful debut, then it has largely achieved that, with both Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas reaching the chequered flag in two consecutive races in China and Japan.

At Suzuka, Perez and Bottas beat the struggling Aston Martins to stay off the last row of the grid. The pair was around 2.3 seconds off the frontrunners in Q1 and one second removed from the rest of the wide 2026 midfield, which was a relatively encouraging step forward but also laid bare the next challenge it now faces.

Cadillac scaled its first peak only to discover there's an equally daunting summit waiting on the other side. Making it onto the 2026 grid was just the start, and now it needs to effectively out-develop its rivals to enter the midfield battle.

The team introduced its first new bits in Japan, a revised diffuser to add rear downforce, but it still needs to find over a second to the likes of Alpine, Williams, Racing Bulls and Haas. Cadillac is readying more upgrades for its home debut in Miami, but so is everyone else.

"It has been very promising, but on the other hand, we also look at the lap times and we can see that we need to develop," said Sergio Perez. "Develop means out-developing our rivals, which is quite a hard thing to do in Formula 1. That's the biggest challenge that Cadillac as a team faces, because these teams have been here for a while. We really need our A-game and now is the time where we all have to prove that we can do it as a team.

"But I believe that we have a good structure, the team is in a good place, and hopefully when we start to develop, we can make significant steps. I think we are on target at the moment. It's still early days, so I'm happy with where we currently are. But at the same time, we did progress a lot from the first to the second race and I want to see the same. We all want to see massive progress, and we want to start closing up the gap right now."

Former Renault F1 tech chiefs Pat Symonds and Nick Chester were reunited at Cadillac

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Perez expected that Cadillac is the team that "will be able to take the most out of that break" because it also has other elements to tidy up, like its trackside procedures and systems. One month ago, it had never run two F1 cars concurrently.

Cadillac's technical consultant Pat Symonds is confident the US-owned team, which largely operates out of Silverstone in the UK this year while building a flagship headquarters in Fishers, Indiana, has the right tools in place to upgrade its car, overseen by chief technical director Nick  Chester.

"I think we've got a very robust process for that," Symonds said earlier this year. "It's something very impressive, actually, with the team. We have the budget to do it.

"Within the budget cap we know what we've got to do. We've already planned out quite an aggressive development programme. I'm pretty confident we can deliver on that."

Cadillac's first upgrades in Japan, just three races into the season, showed a glimpse of that, and Symonds said the new diffuser delivered as expected to bring more downforce to the rear of the car without upsetting the balance.

"Everything we're trying to do is just put load on the car," he said in Suzuka. "And like most people, we want to make sure that the load on the rear is consistent. We had a nice balance between high-speed and low-speed [corners] and we had a nice balance between low-fuel and high-fuel [runs].

"So now if we can just get some more load on the car, I think we can start getting into that midfield a bit."