Valtteri Bottas has been around long enough to know the difference between a genuine performance limitation and the sort of silly, avoidable glitch that only seems to find you when you’re trying to build something from scratch.
In Miami, Cadillac handed him the latter.
Bottas’ race unravelled with a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane — an offence that looks clumsy on paper but, in this case, came down to a problem far more mundane than any dramatic “systems failure”. He says he hit the pit limiter, but not decisively enough for the button to register.
“I pressed the pit limiter button, but apparently not hard enough,” Bottas explained afterwards. The bigger issue, he added, is that Cadillac’s current steering wheel button feedback isn’t as clear or consistent as it needs to be, leaving room for human error at exactly the moment you can’t afford it. It’s been on the team’s radar, but the updated parts haven’t arrived yet — the expectation is they’ll be fitted from the next race.
That’s the sort of sentence you hear a lot inside a start-up operation: it’s known, it’s logged, a fix is coming. The problem is that Formula 1 doesn’t pause while you wait for a new batch of hardware.
The penalty dumped Bottas to the back and, with the MAC-26 already fighting from the wrong end of the grid, there was no realistic way back into anything resembling a result. He ended up two laps down on race winner Kimi Antonelli, a margin that tells you everything about how unforgiving the current competitive order is if you’re stuck in the early-build phase of a new programme.
Cadillac’s first season as F1’s 11th team has been defined by that tension: the basics are mostly there, but the polish isn’t. The raw points tally still reads zero, yet there have been quiet positives behind the scenes. Reliability, for a new entry, has been better than many expected — both cars have seen the flag in every race except the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, where Bottas’ afternoon ended with a fuel system issue.
Miami, then, wasn’t a case of the car giving up. It was a case of a small interface issue turning into a very big sporting consequence.
Bottas didn’t pretend it was acceptable, but he also didn’t sound remotely surprised. “It’s one of the things that happens when you start as a new team,” he said — and that’s the undertone to Cadillac’s entire opening chapter. The team is learning where the weak links are, and it’s doing so in public, with lap times attached.
He was also candid about another reality that can lurk behind these moments: parts consistency. Bottas suggested the team is still “struggling a bit with the quality of certain parts”, describing a lack of uniformity between components fitted to the car. In other words, even when the design is understood, executing it repeatedly to the same standard is a separate challenge — and a familiar one for any operation scaling up at speed.
On pure pace, there’s not much mystery. Bottas and team-mate Sergio Perez still haven’t dragged the Cadillac out of Q1 all season, across four grands prix and two Sprint weekends. Bottas’ best result remains 13th in China, in a race where only 15 drivers made it to the end — the sort of finishing position that reads better in a spreadsheet than it feels in the cockpit.
Yet Bottas insists the situation isn’t “frustrating”, largely because it’s exactly what he signed up for. That matters. Drivers can tolerate tough results if they believe the hardship is part of a bigger build — and if the team is honest about where it’s falling short.
Perez, who finished 16th in Miami, struck a similarly steady tone while still hinting at the pressure Cadillac feels from the pack around it. He believes the team is moving forward, but admitted there’s “a bit of work to do” before Cadillac can live with the midfield over a full stint. His read is that Cadillac can hang on when tyre degradation levels the playing field, but the established teams still have a gear in hand when it’s time to lift the pace.
“And we don’t want to be left behind,” Perez added, pointing out that Cadillac is in a “massive hurry” to find performance with rivals expected to bring upgrades.
That urgency is reflected in the championship table. Cadillac sits tenth in the constructors’ standings, ahead of Aston Martin — but only because of Bottas’ China result. It’s a thin cushion, and not the sort of position you can defend with good intentions and “next race” fixes.
Miami’s pit-limiter episode won’t define Cadillac’s season, but it does capture the reality of year one: the margins aren’t just aerodynamic or strategic. Sometimes they’re as simple — and as costly — as a button that doesn’t quite feel the same every time you press it.
