Checo back in black: Perez shakes off the rust with stealth Ferrari run as Cadillac project looms
Sergio Perez has finally had his day back in an F1 car — and it came in an all-black Ferrari at Imola. Eleven months after his last grand prix start, the six-time race winner turned laps in a 2023-spec SF-23 as he limbered up for his return with Cadillac, the sport’s incoming 11th team.
The session wasn’t about glory runs or headlines; Ferrari kept a lid on the data and there were no official times. Even so, paddock whispers had Perez dipping into the 1:16s — quicker than the 1:17.2 figure that did the rounds on social media — and, more importantly, looking tidy after a year on the sidelines.
This outing doubles as a reset for a driver who admits the end of his Red Bull stint put a dent in his spark. Perez doesn’t hide from it: the last six months at Milton Keynes wore him down. He described “a bit of demotivation” creeping in as results slipped in 2024 and the noise over his future refused to die.
It was a brutal swing from the highs of 2021–23. Red Bull rescued Perez when Racing Point cut him loose, he delivered wins and poles, and in 2023 he helped lock in the team’s 1–2 in the Drivers’ standings — even if Max Verstappen’s 19 victories and 575 points made everybody else look ordinary. Twelve months later, the form deserted him. Eighth in the championship, a bruising run that ultimately coincided with Red Bull missing out on the Constructors’ crown, and a parting of ways announced after the season. The move came late enough that 2025 passed him by.
Time away can be a career trapdoor. Perez used it as oxygen. He kept watching races. He stayed plugged in through friends in the paddock. And when Cadillac came calling, the hunger flicked back on.
He’s signed a multi-year deal and, while the finer points stay under wraps, it’s clear where his head is. This isn’t a parachute; it’s the last big swing. Perez calls the Cadillac adventure his “final project” in F1 and talks about it with the kind of energy you hear from rookies, not veterans with 15 seasons on the odometer. Progress, not instant miracles, is the north star. In his words, where they start matters less than how fast they can move the needle.
That’s the right tone for an all-new operation. The American outfit arrives as the grid’s 11th entry and will be judged on the basics first: structure, reliability, development rhythm. In that context, days like Imola make sense. You take a known quantity — a recent Ferrari — and let your lead driver feel brake shapes and high-speed loads again, get reacquainted with live systems work, knock the muscle memory back into place. No one believes a 2023 Ferrari maps directly onto what Cadillac will race, but the rust has to come off somewhere.
Perez, now 35, sounds like a man who needed the pause far more than he realised. He says stepping out of the hamster wheel — contracts, upgrades, next weekend, repeat — let him see the sport differently. That perspective matters when you’re about to help build a team from zero. It’s simulator hours, feedback loops, and culture-setting as much as it is late-braking into Turn 1.
There’s also an edge to his messaging. He wants to “surprise a lot of people” and make a “strong impact from day one.” It’s classic Checo: understate the romance, set a hard target, and go to work. He’s not leaving F1 with a whimper. The plan is to walk away, when he does, “with a big smile.”
For now, the smile is back. The black Ferrari was only a shakedown, but it read like a prologue. Cadillac will bring the main act. And if Perez’s reboot holds, the grid gets back a savvy racer who’s rediscovered his bite just in time to help an ambitious newcomer learn how to scrap.
