Cadillac isn’t even a quarter of a season into its first Formula 1 campaign and already it’s being asked to act like a fully formed front-runner: pick a pecking order, declare a verdict on its line-up, and, if the internet gets its way, start swinging the axe.
Graeme Lowdon isn’t playing along. The Cadillac team principal has batted away the paddock noise suggesting Valtteri Bottas is under threat, insisting there’s “no basis in truth” to talk of an imminent change — and stressing that, five grands prix into a brand-new operation, the idea of drawing hard conclusions about driver performance is bordering on fantasy.
Yes, Sergio Perez has had the sharper recent headline numbers. Since the pair’s China clash — sparked by a Perez misjudgement at the start — the Mexican has finished ahead in Japan and Miami and held a significant qualifying advantage in Montreal, where he was around eight tenths quicker in both qualifying sessions at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. On the face of it, that’s a chunky margin between two veterans hired specifically to give Cadillac a stable, high-level baseline.
But Lowdon’s point is that Cadillac doesn’t yet have a “baseline” in the way established teams do. This is a programme still building its own reference points: learning how to extract performance, bedding in personnel, and checking that what the numbers say in the tools matches what the car does on track. Add in the run plans outsiders can’t see, the experimental setup directions, and the reality that both cars are being used as development platforms, and you’re left with comparisons that can look definitive from the outside while being anything but inside the garage.
“What I would point to is the sample size here,” Lowdon said, noting Cadillac is “changing things all the time” across both cars and the wider operation. Five races, he argued, isn’t remotely enough to start telling a story about a driver “not doing the job”.
He also reached for an inconvenient detail for the rumour mill: Cadillac is ahead of “another team, a very well-established team” in the championship, and that advantage is owed to Bottas’s P13 in China — not to Perez.
That’s the part that matters when you’re a new entrant fighting to turn weekends into usable learning and bankable points, not just pretty telemetry. Bottas might not have had Perez’s recent pace, but he’s already delivered the result Cadillac currently leans on in the standings. In Lowdon’s eyes, that alone should kill the idea that there’s some urgent internal panic.
More broadly, Cadillac’s leadership sees both drivers as doing the job they were hired to do: bring experience from title-winning environments, offer consistent technical feedback, and help the team avoid the self-inflicted wounds that can come with “trying to go too fast”. Lowdon was blunt on that last point: shortcut the process of building a team from scratch and “you will fail”.
There was also a revealing subtext in how he framed the benefit of two drivers who’ve lived inside the pressure cooker of Mercedes and Red Bull. The risk with that kind of CV isn’t speed — it’s impatience. Put drivers used to world-class kit into a project still finding its operational rhythm and you can easily end up with constant escalation: demands the factory can’t meet yet, friction in the engineering group, and the sort of public blow-ups that make for great radio compilations and terrible culture.
Lowdon suggested Cadillac has got the opposite: two senior pros applying pressure, but at the right cadence. If either Bottas or Perez were throwing their weight around, “the steering wheel [would be] flung out of the cockpit every time the car stops”, he quipped — and everyone would know about it. Instead, he says, both have struck the balance between pushing and not pushing too hard.
Perez, in particular, drew praise for how quickly he has re-engaged after a year away from the sport following a high-profile exit and a period largely out of the paddock. Lowdon described his return as “bold” and said the hunger has been obvious even when Cadillac is fighting in the lower midfield: Perez, he said, has climbed out of the car buzzing after scraps for P16 or P17 “as if” it had been a podium fight.
For Bottas, the message was less about romance and more about value. Lowdon didn’t pretend Cadillac is satisfied with his recent results — “he’s a competitive guy” and the team would prefer better outcomes — but he was adamant there’s no standout issue in preparation or machinery that points to a deeper problem. Differences in pace can come from the usual blend of setup direction, damage, session objectives, or simple variation in performance, and Cadillac’s current phase amplifies all of those variables.
As for the bigger question — whether this is just a 2026 ceasefire before the driver market bites — Lowdon wasn’t interested in feeding the silly season. He reiterated Cadillac is “very happy” with both drivers and highlighted why they were chosen: speed and experience, yes, but also the broader perspective that comes from having worked across multiple teams.
That doesn’t stop the paddock doing what it always does. Planet-wide speculation will keep bubbling, and there are already whispers about Perez attracting interest elsewhere. Meanwhile, Colton Herta remains a name in the conversation around Cadillac’s longer-term American-facing ambitions, with the possibility of earning the FIA Super Licence this year — potentially helped by FP1 appearances — even if his current Formula 2 position doesn’t dramatically improve.
Still, the immediate reality is simpler. Cadillac has a new car, a new team, a new working method, and two drivers who — whatever the timing screens say on a given Saturday — are being judged internally on far more than a qualifying delta.
If Lowdon’s tone is anything to go by, Cadillac’s priority right now isn’t winning the argument on social media. It’s building the sort of foundation that gives those arguments less oxygen in the first place.
