Cadillac’s first Friday as a fully fledged two-car F1 outfit was always going to be messy around the edges. What it probably didn’t need, on top of the usual debut-weekend nerves, was to spend most of second practice watching Sergio Perez’s MAC-26 parked up on the grass at Albert Park.
Perez ended the day as the only driver not to record a lap time in FP2, after a stop on track brought an already stuttering programme to a halt. The immediate suspicion earlier in the afternoon had been a sensor glitch, but Cadillac’s engineering consultant Pat Symonds said the reality was both more involved — and more frustrating.
“It wasn’t actually a sensor. In the end, we had two separate problems,” Symonds explained after the running.
The first issue surfaced late in FP1: a fuel system problem significant enough that the team had to remove the battery to get at what it needed to fix. That’s a job that eats up time even for established operations, and for a team still bedding in its procedures under pressure, it’s the sort of delay that snowballs quickly. Perez only managed 14 laps in the morning session and ended up 20th of 22, ahead of the two Aston Martins, with his lap count among the lowest in FP1.
Cadillac eventually got Perez back out, but the reset didn’t last long. Before he’d managed to complete a flying lap in FP2, Perez was forced to pull over again — this time with a separate hydraulic leak.
“Then, unfortunately, it’s a totally unrelated hydraulic leak, which we haven’t yet analysed,” Symonds said. “We haven’t got the car back to see exactly what it is.”
The mechanical detail matters, but the wider significance is what it does to Cadillac’s learning curve. With the 2026 regulations and hardware demands already forcing teams to treat every lap as data gold, losing an entire practice session at the season opener hits harder than it might have in a more stable era.
Saturday in Melbourne also marks one year since Cadillac’s entry to the grid was confirmed, and team boss Graeme Lowdon has spoken recently about having a “very grounded appreciation” of what it takes to build a team. Days like this are what he means: not the glamour of rolling into the paddock with a new badge, but the relentless, unglamorous work of getting the basics repeatable.
Symonds put it bluntly when asked about the milestone of running two cars together on a race weekend for the first time.
“Putting two cars out there… It’s not twice as difficult as one car. It’s like four times as difficult!” he said. “There’s so much going on.”
Continuity is the currency of a well-drilled F1 team — the same people making the same calls, in the same rhythm, under the same pressures — and Cadillac simply hasn’t had the luxury of that yet.
“One of the things that’s really important in the team is having continuity. By definition, we can’t have continuity,” Symonds added. “We’ve got a lot of people working together for the first time… I think the team has performed absolutely superbly.”
On the other side of the garage, Valtteri Bottas was left to shoulder the workload. He described his own day as relatively straightforward despite “a few challenges” during the build process, and Cadillac at least came away with some measurable progress: 17th in FP1, 19th in FP2, and around four-tenths found between the two sessions. In a new team’s first competitive hours, that’s the kind of mundane forward motion you cling to.
Perez, though, could only look at the bigger picture — and he didn’t dress it up as simple first-weekend teething.
“It wasn’t the easiest day out there,” he said. “We had a lot of issues, a lot of small details that we need to clean up. Hopefully, for tomorrow, we can have a much more straightforward day. That would be ideal for us.”
Asked whether that was just the price of being part of a brand-new operation, Perez agreed in principle — then delivered the line that will make Cadillac’s senior figures wince.
“In a way, yes, but also I think we got some cleanup to do on our side,” he said, “because we’ve been having similar issues since Barcelona.”
That’s the uncomfortable part. If the problems were purely the sort of one-off breakages you expect when you finally start leaning on components in anger, you shrug and move on. Perez’s point was that some of this has been hanging around since the car’s first appearance on track in January. That shifts the conversation from “early hiccups” to “operational sharpness” — the less glamorous battle new teams have to win before the lap time even becomes the story.
As for where Cadillac actually sits on pace, Perez insisted the headline gap from FP1 — roughly four seconds down — flatters nobody and reflects a compromised run rather than the car’s true baseline.
“I think we haven’t had a lap; the lap I had was with the wrong deployment,” he said. “I just did a single lap on the soft. So I do expect this to really take a step forward for tomorrow, so hopefully we can have a much cleaner day.”
Cadillac will need exactly that: clean. Not perfect, not miraculous — just a normal Saturday where the car runs, the processes hold together, and Perez gets the chance to do what he was hired to do, which is accelerate development by giving the team clear, high-quality feedback. Friday in Melbourne was a reminder that in Formula 1, you don’t get to test your way into competence at leisure. The stopwatch, and the weekend, keep moving whether you’re ready or not.
