Cadillac’s first proper week of life as an F1 team hasn’t been the glossy Hollywood montage the branding department would’ve ordered. It’s been closer to what Graeme Lowdon called it in the paddock: debugging. And if you want the truest snapshot of where the new operation is right now, it’s Sergio Perez shrugging off a list of glitches and essentially saying: better here than Melbourne.
Ten months after Cadillac got the final green light to become Formula 1’s 11th team, it’s finally turning wheels in anger with its first car — Ferrari-powered “for now”, as everyone in the garage keeps stressing. The early running began with a shakedown at Silverstone, where Perez became the first driver to lap a Cadillac F1 car. Then came the closed Barcelona outing, five days in which teams could choose three to run. Cadillac picked the opening two days, and you could feel the intent: start early, get messy, learn fast.
Valtteri Bottas opened the mileage with 33 laps on Monday, before Perez added 11. It wasn’t a headline-grabbing total, but it did tell you what Cadillac’s priorities were. While Mercedes clocked 149 laps that same day, Cadillac was clearly stopping to fix, tweak, re-check, and then try again — the very stuff you can’t shortcut when the whole organisation is new, not just the chassis.
Perez then took over for the second day of Cadillac running and did what the engineers needed: 66 laps, a full Spanish Grand Prix distance, and the sort of steady accumulation of data that matters a lot more than any lap time ever could at this stage. Mercedes, on its final day, managed 168. The contrast wasn’t about pace; it was about maturity.
Perez didn’t dress it up.
“More than surprises, problems,” he said, when asked what the shakedown had thrown at them. “Problems on all kinds of fronts – with the engine, with the car, with a few electronic issues.
“But I’m glad it’s happening now… we still have a lot of work ahead of us, especially as a new team.”
That line matters. Most teams talk about gremlins in the abstract during winter testing; Cadillac is living them in the most literal way. It’s learning not only a brand-new car built to brand-new 2026 rules, but also integrating a power unit from a supplier it hasn’t raced with before, all while building the operational muscle memory every established team already has.
And yet, Perez was also clear the day had moved in the right direction.
“We were able to do a lot of running and gathered a lot of data. But I think we’re making progress in virtually every lap. So yes, it was a positive day.”
In other words: yes, it broke; yes, it was annoying; yes, that’s the point.
Lowdon’s framing has been consistent all week. The temptation for a new entry is to chase a big lap number as a symbolic win — a signal to the outside world that the project is “real”. Cadillac’s approach, at least in Barcelona, has been more sober: stop when it needs to stop, solve what it can solve, and don’t pretend a clean run is more valuable than a painful lesson.
“The key thing for us is exactly that, debugging,” Lowdon explained. “We could have run more laps, or we could have looked to solve certain problems, make sure that they’re solved and tick those off the list. And that’s the most important thing.”
The calendar helps. Cadillac gets this shakedown week, then two tests in Bahrain, and the team is openly treating Barcelona as the place to flush out the awkward failures — the kind that don’t show up on a dyno or in simulation, but bite the moment you add vibration, temperature cycles and real-world complexity.
“We’re very much focused on using this time in Barcelona to shake down all these systems, iron out all of the various gremlins and then be on the front foot for Bahrain,” Lowdon said.
That’s the key strategic bit. If you’re Cadillac, you don’t need to “win” January. You need to arrive in Bahrain with systems that boot up, sensors that talk to each other, and procedures that don’t require an all-hands crisis meeting every time something flickers. It’s unglamorous, but it’s the foundation of everything that follows.
There’s also a human element here that’s easy to miss. Perez and Bottas aren’t just logging laps; they’re effectively acting as accelerants for a young team’s learning curve — giving usable feedback while the group builds its own internal language. That’s why Cadillac handing the car back to Bottas for the final day of running isn’t just a schedule note; it’s part of spreading the understanding and pressure-testing different driving styles against the same early problems.
And Cadillac’s not hiding from the optics, either. Amid the nuts-and-bolts work, the team pushed out its own moment of polish with a special edition livery tease — a reminder that even in debugging mode, it knows how to sell the dream.
The Special Edition livery right where it belongs 😍pic.twitter.com/NzSo0WMFFY
— Cadillac Formula 1 Team (@Cadillac_F1)January 29, 2026
Still, the substance is in the unsexy details: engine quirks, electronic issues, car problems “on all kinds of fronts”. It’s not ideal, but it’s also not alarming in isolation. The real question is how quickly Cadillac can turn those faults into fixes, and those fixes into reliable processes — because once the Bahrain tests start, the runway shortens fast.
For now, Perez’s verdict sums it up neatly: plenty of pain, but the right kind, at the right time. If Cadillac is going to arrive in Melbourne looking like a functioning F1 team rather than a well-funded experiment, this is exactly the week it needed — warts and all.
