Sergio Perez gets back to work with Cadillac F1 as 2026 debut looms
Six-time grand prix winner Sergio Perez has been through the doors at Cadillac F1’s Silverstone base, helmet bag in hand and smile in place, for his first proper day on the job: turning laps on General Motors’ simulator ahead of the team’s 2026 entry.
Fresh footage from the outfit shows Perez arriving in the UK after a stop at Cadillac’s Charlotte hub, a neat snapshot of how this project is being stitched together across two continents. The message is simple: the countdown is real now.
Perez, who’ll form one half of Cadillac’s inaugural F1 line-up next year, flagged the plan during a breezy media hit at Dodger Stadium, where he tossed the ceremonial first pitch before the Dodgers-Phillies game. “Next week, I will be in Charlotte and in England,” he said. “For me, it’s important to drive this year, especially for the neck, so that my body adapts again to what’s going to happen in 2026. I will train in the simulator, and there are plans for me to test an old F1 car.”
That last bit is the tricky part. As a brand-new entrant, Cadillac doesn’t have a mothballed chassis lying around for Checo to pound around a test track. Whether the team borrows an older car from elsewhere or leans on lower-formula machinery remains to be seen. Until then, the simulator is king.
And that suits Perez just fine. For a driver coming back after a year off the grid, simulator mileage is more than a box-tick — it’s where the muscle memory returns and the neck gets reacquainted with life at 5g. It’s also where the foundations get poured: procedures, ergonomics, communication, all the small things that become big problems if you leave them to week one of the season.
“The goal is to arrive ready as a team for the first race,” Perez said, name-checking the 2026 Australian Grand Prix. “If we achieve that, I believe the potential is immense. A year of Formula 1 means lots of races; we’ll evolve. In the meantime, we need to be a solid team. I’m sure we’re going to surprise and that we can win points early in the season.”
Ambitious? Absolutely. Necessary? Also yes. You don’t get many free hits as a new entrant. The early phase of a debut season is often about staying tidy, finishing races, and learning fast — but Perez isn’t here to play it safe. That’s the value of putting a proven race winner in from day one: he’ll set the bar high and force the programme to chase it.
The Silverstone visit is a milestone for Cadillac as much as it is for Perez. It’s the first time one of its race drivers has begun proper prep work in the UK base as the 2026 car progresses from design boards and dyno cells into a living, breathing race project. Those split-infrastructure logistics — Charlotte for GM brains and brawn, Silverstone for F1 race ops — demand tight choreography. Days like this are where you see whether the handover is clean.
It also offers a subtle tell about how Cadillac intends to operate. A lot of newer teams try to walk before they run; Perez’s schedule, bouncing from Charlotte to Silverstone with simulator work bracketed by plans for track time, suggests Cadillac would rather sprint. The hardware will arrive when it arrives, but the people and the process can be race-ready well before the lights go out.
Of course, it’s easy to talk a good game in August. The hard part starts when you strap the thing to the asphalt. Still, Perez has been around long enough to know what matters, and his language — neck conditioning, simulator cadence, early points — sounds like a driver who’s tuned to the right frequencies.
There’ll be bumps. There always are for new teams, and the first six months of a debut season tends to stretch even the biggest operations. But if Cadillac can get Perez comfortable early, give him a car that behaves, and nail the operational basics, his belief in early points won’t sound outlandish for long.
For now, it’s simple: one day in Silverstone, one more in Charlotte, a season and a half of prep condensed into a few precious months. And for the team making its first bow on the world stage next year, there are worse ways to start than with a driver who’s already acting like the lights have turned green.
