Sergio Perez has brushed off Mario Andretti’s suggestion that Cadillac’s returning drivers have been carrying “a little bit of rust” into the opening rounds of 2026, insisting he’s been on the pace almost from the moment he climbed back into an F1 cockpit.
Andretti, a 1978 world champion and now a board member of Cadillac’s fledgling F1 project, floated the idea after the Chinese Grand Prix that both Perez and Valtteri Bottas were still shaking off the effects of a year away from the grid. It’s the sort of line that lands differently when it comes from inside the tent — part reassurance, part pressure valve — but Perez wasn’t in the mood to wear it.
“To be honest, I think we’ve been performing on a very high level,” Perez said ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix. “Especially, I was very happy with my weekend in Melbourne. My first qualifying, I was quite happy with it. In the race, we had very different scenarios. We had a lot of damage. So it hasn’t been really straightforward.”
That “not straightforward” refrain is doing a lot of heavy lifting for Cadillac so far. The team is finding its feet at the back end of the field, trading laps and lessons with Aston Martin, and measuring progress in the currency that matters for new operations: finishing races, collecting clean data, and avoiding the kind of early-season chaos that can set a programme back months.
In that light, simply getting both cars to the chequered flag in China and Japan has been a quiet win. It’s not glamorous, but it’s how you build a baseline.
Perez’s point, though, is that his own rhythm hasn’t been the issue — the weekends have been compromised. Melbourne, he says, was encouraging, but the race was derailed by damage. Shanghai followed a similar pattern.
“Shanghai wasn’t a straightforward weekend. I had a lot of damage in the race,” he said. “So I haven’t had a complete weekend, let’s say.
“But I think in terms of my performance, I’m fairly happy with it. Coming back and straight away, I was in the pace within a couple of days. I’m in a good place in regards to driving.”
There’s an important distinction in that answer, and it’s one drivers in new projects lean on: speed versus outcome. Cadillac’s headline results don’t yet flatter either driver, but Perez is framing this as an execution story rather than an adaptation one — as if the lap time is already there, waiting for a weekend that isn’t punctured by damage or disrupted by car issues.
Bottas, for his part, was more willing to entertain Andretti’s premise — at least up to a point. Asked whether it’s even possible to judge his level cleanly with a brand-new team and an unreliable platform, he didn’t pretend it was simple.
“It is sometimes quite difficult to get the proper read on it, and feel, especially if you have issues with a car, or reliability, if you miss sessions,” Bottas said. “But I have to say, Melbourne, it felt like kind of getting back to it, for sure. Not at like 100 per cent peak performance.”
And then came the pivot: China, in his view, was the moment the old instincts snapped back into place.
“But in China, I felt really good. Both qualifying and the race. With a damaged car, again, difficult to gauge, but I felt like I never was away in China, so that was good.”
For Cadillac, this is exactly why it went experience-first with its inaugural line-up. When the car isn’t quite right and the weekends are messy, you need drivers who can separate noise from signal — who can tell engineers what’s fundamental and what’s circumstantial, and who can keep a young team moving forward without spiralling into overreaction.
In the early constructors’ standings, Cadillac sits 10th, ahead of Aston Martin by virtue of Bottas’s 13th-place finish in China. It’s modest, but it’s something tangible to point at during those long debriefs when everyone’s trying to quantify progress.
Andretti’s “rust” comment may have been meant as a gentle explanation for why the ceiling hasn’t been hit yet, but the drivers’ responses show a team still calibrating its internal narrative. Perez is keen to make it clear that, whatever Cadillac’s current limitations, he doesn’t see sharpness as one of them. Bottas acknowledges a ramp-up — then underlines that it didn’t take long.
Either way, the subtext is the same: when Cadillac finally strings a clean weekend together, both of its veterans expect to be ready, not “getting ready.”
