Cadillac will squeeze in a second filming day in Bahrain on Monday, just 48 hours before the 2026 pre-season programme resumes in Sakhir — a telling move from an expansion outfit that knows it can’t afford to arrive undercooked.
The General Motors-backed team is gearing up for its first Formula 1 season after its entry was approved last year, and it’s already burning through every permitted opportunity to get its new car working in the real world. Filming days are officially about promotional material, but in practice they’re precious: limited running, limited tyres, limited mileage — and a rare chance to put engineers, drivers and systems under something resembling live pressure without the full glare of a test week.
Cadillac already completed a filming day at Silverstone on January 16, making it one of the earliest to run a 2026 car. But the more revealing reference point came during the five-day “Shakedown Week” in Barcelona, where every team bar Williams logged laps. Cadillac emerged from Spain with the smallest total of any squad that took the maximum three days, clocking 164 laps. That left it 76 laps behind Audi — the next lowest — and a hefty 336 off Mercedes, which topped the unofficial mileage chart with 500.
In a regulation reset year, those gaps matter. Not because Barcelona mileage is a trophy in itself, but because every lap is a chance to validate correlations, bed in procedures, and discover the sort of early-season headaches that don’t show up on a simulator schedule. Cadillac’s Bahrain filming day reads like a practical response: bank more track time now, reduce the list of unknowns before the stopwatch starts mattering in the February tests.
The timing is sharp. Monday’s running will come two days before the second pre-season test begins on February 11, the first of two three-day sessions in Sakhir (February 11–13 and February 18–20). Cadillac will be conscious that the first test was always going to be noisy: new cars, new workflows, and the inevitable first-wave teething issues. The point of a well-used filming day is to arrive at the test with fewer fires to put out, not to spend the opening morning discovering a sensor fault or chasing a basic hydraulic gremlin.
It’s also a useful moment to get a proper feel for a new driver pairing that leans heavily on experience. Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas will shoulder Cadillac’s debut season, and that’s a line-up built less around headline hype and more around the grind of development work — the unglamorous feedback loops, the ability to describe a car’s behaviour precisely, the willingness to repeat runs and keep the engineering group honest.
If Cadillac’s early Barcelona mileage hinted at a programme still finding its feet, the team’s off-track choreography has been anything but timid. After appearing in an all-black test livery in Spain, Cadillac is set to reveal its full 2026 race colours on Sunday via an advert during the Super Bowl, staged at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks.
That’s Cadillac planting its flag in the loudest possible way: not just joining F1, but doing it with the kind of mainstream American exposure most teams can only dream of. There’s an obvious commercial logic, but it’s also a statement of intent — and it raises the stakes for everything that follows. Big stages invite big scrutiny, and a slick launch will only buy so much patience if the car looks raw once testing begins.
Behind the scenes, there’s movement too. Marc Hynes — Lewis Hamilton’s former manager and a previous British F3 champion — is poised to take up a role with the team ahead of the new season. Hynes already has ties to Cadillac through his work with reserve driver Zhou Guanyu, and Cadillac team principal Graeme Lowdon is part of Zhou’s management set-up as well.
That sort of personnel overlap is normal enough in modern F1, but it’s notable for a new operation building its sporting structure at speed. Cadillac isn’t just assembling a car; it’s assembling a working ecosystem, with the relationships and decision-making lines that can make or break a first-year programme.
For now, the immediate priority is straightforward: laps, systems, processes — and making sure Bahrain testing is about learning the car rather than simply getting it to run. In a new-era season, you don’t get your time back. Cadillac’s decision to use its second filming day on the eve of the test reads like a team that’s already learned that lesson.
