Valtteri Bottas climbed out of Cadillac’s new-era Formula 1 car in Barcelona wearing the sort of grin you don’t see from a driver who’s simply ticking off winter mileage. The lap count was modest, the running was stop-start, and the car spent more time in “let’s just make sure it works” mode than anything resembling a performance programme. But for Bottas, this was the point: the first proper step back into an F1 cockpit, with a brand-new team, under regulations that have reset everyone’s reference points.
Cadillac’s first collective test appearance came on a busy opening day at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, with seven of the grid’s 11 teams taking to the track. The headlines elsewhere will be about shapes, colours and early pecking-order whispers. Cadillac’s story, at least for now, is more fundamental — getting the thing to run, understanding what’s different, and building a rhythm that didn’t exist a few months ago.
For Bottas, Monday was also the end of a slightly awkward wait. Cadillac’s preparatory mileage up to this point had been handled exclusively by Sergio Perez, who arrived with the freedom of a driver not tied up by a 2025 race programme. Bottas, Mercedes reserve last season, missed the team’s earlier TPC running at Imola in an older Ferrari and then saw a planned Silverstone filming day opportunity disappear after a scheduling change. Barcelona, finally, was his first real-world taste of the project.
He managed 33 laps in the morning before handing over, with Cadillac’s day ultimately shaped by minor technical gremlins that limited the combined total to 44 laps. That’s not the kind of number that makes rivals nervous, but it is enough to start joining the dots — especially when the dots have moved.
Bottas didn’t dress it up: the 2026 machinery feels alien compared to the cars he last raced.
“It’s definitely a big difference from before,” he said after his run. “The cars, they handle differently. You have a bit less load, especially in the high-speed corners.”
That tallies with what you’d expect from a fresh aero and chassis rule set: the familiar “lean on it at 250km/h” certainty is dulled, and drivers have to relearn where the car is going to give and where it’s going to bite. But Bottas’ next point is the one engineers across the pitlane have been circling since these rules were signed off — the power delivery, and the compromises it forces.
“The PU, you have so much more torque out of the corners, but then you have the battery to manage,” he said.
That one sentence captures the emerging driver workload of this era. It’s not simply “new cars, new tyres, new aero”. It’s a different relationship between throttle, energy and lap shape — and at a new team, it’s a lot to absorb in a hurry.
There was also a telling aside: Bottas referenced Ferrari in the context of the power unit learning curve. Cadillac’s early running has included a first “proper day” of track time for Ferrari’s new power unit package, which only underlines why nobody at Cadillac looked remotely bothered about losing half a day to niggles.
“Naturally, there is a learning curve,” Bottas said. “So still lots to learn, lots to improve, but it’s quite a challenge for every team.”
In other words: if you’re expecting clean, uninterrupted testing from anyone in the first week of a new regulation cycle, you haven’t been paying attention to Formula 1.
Cadillac’s plan from here is straightforward. With the team set to run on two of the remaining four days in Barcelona — the maximum allocation for anyone attending — the only metric that matters is accumulation: laps, systems checks, correlation, and reliability. The lap count needs to stop being a story in itself.
“The priority list now is get more laps each day,” Bottas said. “Some of them are just kind of installs and stuff. But yeah, we need to get some proper running in, get the mileage in, and make sure we get a reliable package for race one.”
That “race one” reference is doing heavy lifting. There’s no time for romanticism once the calendar starts; new teams don’t get graded on effort. Cadillac will arrive at its debut Grand Prix with the same expectation as everybody else: to function, to compete, and to not look like a test programme that accidentally wandered into qualifying.
Bottas, though, sounded energised rather than weighed down by the scale of it. He’s been around enough top-tier operations to know what “starting from zero” really means, and he didn’t pretend Cadillac’s early issues were anything other than normal.
“At the end, we got a little bit longer run as well, so these are the first steps of debugging, and getting everything to work better,” he said. “That’s why we’re here. It seems like every team had some issues.”
What stood out, more than the technical talk, was how he framed the culture of the project — “fresh eyes”, “different angles”, experience pulled from multiple teams. That’s the sort of phrase drivers use when they’re trying to describe a garage that feels alive rather than one that’s just executing a plan.
“I really enjoy everything so far with the team,” Bottas added. “Everyone has been working so hard to be here. Starting from zero, it’s a bigger challenge than all the other teams.”
Barcelona won’t tell us where Cadillac truly sits — not yet, and certainly not off installation laps and interrupted runs. But it did offer a first look at the dynamic: a returning driver clearly revelling in the reset, a new outfit finding its feet, and a regulation change that’s already forcing experienced hands to recalibrate what “a good lap” even feels like.
For Bottas, the smile made sense. This isn’t just a new car. It’s a new version of Formula 1 — and, for him, a very real second act.
