Xavier Marcos Padros, the voice in Charles Leclerc’s ear for five seasons at Ferrari, has resurfaced in Formula 1 as chief race engineer for the Cadillac F1 project — another key brick laid as the American outfit builds toward its 2026 debut.
Marcos Padros is a familiar name to anyone who’s followed Leclerc’s rise. After spells with HRT and Williams — including a stint as Felipe Massa’s performance engineer — he joined Ferrari in 2018 and became Leclerc’s race engineer from 2019. The partnership produced five grand prix wins and a calm, methodical radio tone that Ferrari fans came to recognise instantly.
His time on the pit wall in red ended abruptly after the 2024 Miami Grand Prix, when Ferrari reassigned him to other internal programmes. Bryan Bozzi stepped in and the Leclerc–Bozzi pairing hit the ground running, winning Monaco in emotional fashion and adding victories at Monza and Austin before Ferrari’s form nosedived into a winless 2025 campaign.
Marcos Padros then popped up in January as technical director of Cadillac’s LMDh programme in WEC and IMSA. Now comes confirmation he’s moved across to the Cadillac F1 arm, taking on a leadership role that will shape the team’s trackside operation. It’s a smart pickup: he’s worked inside modern Ferrari, navigated the politics and pressure, and understands how to guide an elite driver through the fog of a grand prix.
Cadillac, preparing for a 2026 entry, has been quietly busy. After spending much of 2025 running through simulated race weekends, the team conducted its first real on-track exercise last month at Imola with Sergio Perez driving a black-liveried 2023 Ferrari. Marcos Padros was understood to be among the personnel on site — a useful shakedown for processes, people and nerves as much as for the car.
The personnel picture is sharpening, too. Cadillac’s race engineer line-up for 2026 is set: Carlo Pasetti, formerly a performance engineer at Aston Martin, will work with Perez, while John Howard — Pierre Gasly’s race engineer at Alpine until his departure in April 2025 — will partner Valtteri Bottas. That trio of Pasetti, Howard and Marcos Padros gives Cadillac a spine of engineers who’ve seen proper mileage at the sharp end, and that matters when you’re starting from zero.
For Leclerc loyalists, Marcos Padros’s move might tug at the nostalgia strings. Their radio exchanges spanned Leclerc’s first Ferrari wins and the 2022 title push that came up short. But this is an upward step for the Spaniard: chief race engineer is the nerve centre between design office and pit wall, the role that turns theory into points on Sundays. That Cadillac moved him across from its sportscar side suggests a unified technical culture — and a desire to transplant F1-grade discipline into the new operation fast.
It’s also notable that Cadillac’s initial test work has been framed around Ferrari hardware and Ferrari people. Testing an older Ferrari at Imola isn’t just symbolism; it’s a chance to benchmark procedures against a known, reference-quality platform before the team’s own car turns a wheel. Anyone who’s spent years inside Maranello’s system, like Marcos Padros, can be a translator for that exercise — which is precisely the kind of edge an expansion outfit needs.
Perez and Bottas bring more than a decade of grand prix experience apiece to anchor the driver side of the project in 2026. Pair them with an engineering group that’s worked with Gasly, Massa and Leclerc, and you start to see the blueprint: sensible, proven hands as Cadillac steps into a regulation reset and the choppy opening months of life in F1.
None of this guarantees a soft landing in 2026. New teams quickly learn that Formula 1 punishes inefficiency, and that culture can’t be bought off the shelf. But Marcos Padros’s arrival gives Cadillac another leader who knows what “good” looks like, and how to get there without the noise.
Ferrari, meanwhile, has long since moved on, with Bozzi now an established presence on Leclerc’s radio. The Monegasque’s 2024 wins at Monaco, Monza and Austin marked a bright interlude before a barren 2025, and the Scuderia will be banking on stability to restore its bite.
For Cadillac, though, this is the moment when the spreadsheets and seating charts start to resemble a racing team. A seasoned chief race engineer is in place. The race engineers are named. The drivers are lined up. The countdown to 2026 keeps getting louder.
