Cadillac will hand Colton Herta another useful slice of Formula 1 track time this weekend in Budapest, with the American set to step into Valtteri Bottas’ car for first practice at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
It’s the second time Cadillac has used Herta to tick off its rookie-running obligation in 2026, but it’s also plainly more than a box-ticking exercise. For a new team still trying to turn “promising” Fridays into anything resembling a normal Sunday, every properly structured session matters — and FP1 at the Hungaroring is as good a laboratory as you’ll find on the calendar.
Herta has been on Cadillac’s books as a development driver ahead of the 2026 season, while also juggling a first campaign in Formula 2. His F2 form has been solid rather than spectacular so far — five points finishes, with fifth in Barcelona his best — but the bigger story is the access he’s getting to F1 mileage early in his European single-seater learning curve.
Barcelona, in fact, was where he first sampled an F1 weekend properly, deputising in FP1 and winding up last on the timesheets, almost two seconds slower than Bottas. That margin is as blunt as it sounds, but it also tells you why Cadillac wants him back in the car: not to chase headlines, but to add another data point as the team continues to map what its package wants and how quickly a driver can find the edges of it.
“It’s very exciting to get another chance in FP1,” Herta said ahead of his Budapest outing. “It’s a good opportunity for my personal experience, but the ultimate goal is, of course, to help the team with its development.
“It’s been six weeks since I was last in the car and there’s been a lot of evolution in that time. My job is to help the race drivers have the best possible Hungarian Grand Prix – but also provide the feedback that will aid the team in its long-term development aims and give me a better baseline in future sessions.”
That “evolution” line is doing some heavy lifting. Cadillac is still point-less at the halfway mark of its first F1 season, and while nobody inside the paddock is pretending that was ever going to be simple, the task now is to make sure the development curve is steep enough to stop the year becoming an exercise in survival.
Bottas has delivered the team’s best result to date with 13th in China, and Sergio Perez thought he’d finally opened Cadillac’s points account in Monaco before a post-race penalty dropped him from 10th to 15th. Belgium last weekend offered a slightly different sort of frustration: Bottas came within 0.022s of outqualifying Esteban Ocon’s Haas. When you’re new and you’re struggling, those tiny margins are the ones that sting — because they suggest the door is there, just not quite open.
Budapest, though, is being approached with cautious optimism from within the team. Bottas believes the Hungaroring should suit the MAC-26 better than Spa did, and he’s keen to head into the summer break feeling the trend is finally pointing the right way.
“It was good to do a full race distance last weekend and it seemed like we were a little closer to the midfield,” Bottas said. “The Hungaroring should be better suited to our car and we’re keen to go into the break with momentum.
“A lot of Finns come to Hungary for this grand prix and that’s always a huge positive for me. I’ll certainly be looking for the flags in the grandstands.”
From Cadillac’s perspective, Herta’s FP1 run isn’t just about giving Bottas a session off — it’s about turning that hour into something the engineers can actually use. Team principal Graeme Lowdon has been candid that reliability remains a priority, and that mileage is still king for a team learning, in real time, how every new part behaves across a weekend.
“Hungary is likely to be another hot weekend – but at a circuit that will perhaps suit the characteristics of our car a little better than last week,” Lowdon said. “I’m pleased with the progress that we have made across the opening half of our first F1 season, but we still have work to do to achieve the reliability that we want.
“The more mileage we accrue, the better positioned we will be to understand our package and develop the car.”
One item on the immediate checklist is a set of new brake drums, brought in to ease an issue that surfaced in Austria. Budapest, with its repeated traction zones and heavy demands on consistency, is a straightforward place to gather the kind of comparative information Cadillac needs — not glamorous, but essential.
Lowdon added: “In particular, we will be looking to put mileage on the new brake drums introduced to ease the issue we had in Austria.
“We will be stress-testing the MAC-26 with a series of race simulations so both drivers can extract the maximum performance from the car. There are no shortcuts in designing certain parts of the car and every operating scenario is completely new for us but we are constantly learning and improving as a team.”
Herta’s appearance also pushes Cadillac further through this season’s mandatory rookie quota. Under the rules, each team must run a rookie — a driver with no more than two grand prix starts — in four FP1 sessions across the year, split evenly between the two cars. With this run, Bottas and Perez will each have sat out once, leaving both still needing to miss another FP1 later in the season.
For Herta, it’s another chance to show he can be more than a name on a development programme. For Cadillac, it’s another hour to interrogate a car that’s still trying to introduce itself to Formula 1. And at this stage of their first year, that’s not a minor thing — it’s the job.
