Pat Symonds has been around long enough to recognise a familiar pattern in Formula 1: the moment a driver stops being useful to a front-running operation, the narrative hardens, the margins disappear, and a career gets reduced to a highlight reel of mistakes.
So when the Cadillac executive engineering consultant sat in Bahrain and was asked about Sergio Perez — freshly installed at the sport’s newest, 11th team for 2026 — Symonds didn’t hedge. He called Perez “very competent”, said the bad press of the last couple of years was “undeserved”, and pointed to the one thing engineers tend to trust more than paddock opinion: what a driver actually does when the laptop comes out and the debrief begins.
“I didn’t know Checo,” Symonds said, reflecting on their first simulator work together. “So it was really good, even in that first simulator session, to listen to what he had to say. I was very impressed.”
That’s the interesting bit here. Not the rehabilitation arc, not the nostalgia of a proven winner taking on a start-up. It’s that Cadillac — a team with no interest in romanticism and every incentive to gather clean information quickly — seems to like what it’s getting from Perez.
Cadillac has gone for experience across the garage: Perez alongside Valtteri Bottas, with Zhou Guanyu as reserve. Symonds, who worked with Bottas at Williams, made it clear the Finn’s qualities are exactly what a new operation needs: speed, calm, feedback. But he lingered on Perez, because Perez is the one arriving with the baggage.
Red Bull’s split with Perez at the end of 2024 didn’t happen in a vacuum. He’d re-signed to stay alongside Max Verstappen, then a week after the season ended the team announced they’d agreed to part ways with the six-time grand prix winner. The preceding two seasons had been a slow-motion grind of speculation, mid-season “will he, won’t he” chatter, and the not-so-subtle sense that his seat was being judged against a standard almost nobody meets.
In 2023, Perez still finished second in the championship and won twice. It didn’t matter: Verstappen won 19 races, and Perez’s points haul being less than half of his team-mate’s became the stick used to beat him. In 2024, things got uglier. Red Bull struggled with the RB21’s handling; Verstappen still wrapped up the title with eight wins, while Perez slid to eighth. Even Verstappen publicly called out how “very harsh” the criticism had been, noting the car was “difficult to drive”.
That’s where Symonds’ defence lands. In a team like Red Bull — built around a generational reference point and relentlessly optimised around the championship fight — a number two driver is expected to do two things at once: be close enough to matter strategically, and invisible enough not to cause disruption. Perez’s record there is not nothing. Five wins, two Constructors’ Championships for the team, and a handful of afternoons where he played the role perfectly. Red Bull famously hailed him as a “legend” over the radio after he held up Lewis Hamilton at Abu Dhabi in 2021, buying Verstappen the breathing room that became decisive later in the race.
But the gig is ruthless. When Red Bull didn’t get the double in 2024, Perez’s P8 became the headline. Perez’s camp, led by his father, argued the cars were built for Verstappen — and, in 2024 at least, even Verstappen had to fight the RB21 at times. None of that changes the outcome. It just explains why a driver can go from contract in hand to out the door within days.
Cadillac, though, is a different ecosystem. There’s no Verstappen-shaped shadow hanging over the other side of the garage. No expectation that the car will win immediately. What there *is* is an engineering group that needs to compress years of learning into months, and that requires drivers who can articulate what the car is doing, not simply drive around it.
Symonds’ comments were telling on that front. He praised Perez’s feedback and work ethic, and made a point of noting Zhou’s presence in briefings and understanding of what’s going on. Those are the sorts of details engineers mention when they’re seeing a team culture forming, not when they’re making polite noises for a microphone.
None of this means Cadillac’s first season will be pretty on the timing screens. The Bahrain pre-season test offered a reality check, even if the usual caveats apply about fuel loads and engine modes. Cadillac completed 320 laps across the three days. Bottas’ best was a 1:36.824, 17th quickest and three seconds off the pace set by Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes, while Perez was 19th, another half-second back.
Perez, for his part, has been blunt about what “acceptable” looks like. He told Reuters the team would be “very disappointed” if it finished 11th in the Constructors’ standings. “We know we will not win the championship for sure,” he said, “but we definitely want to make a lot of progress and beat a couple of teams.”
That’s not a driver lowering expectations to protect himself; it’s a driver trying to set a standard inside a new organisation. Cadillac is arriving with heavy investment and big ambitions — and it has hired two drivers who know exactly what a functioning F1 team feels like when it’s doing the basics well.
For Perez, there’s a personal edge to this season that doesn’t need dressing up. At Red Bull he was judged primarily against one man. At Cadillac, he’ll be judged on whether he can help build something that works — and whether, after years of being framed as the weak link in a championship machine, he can remind people that competence in F1 is a skill, not a consolation prize.
Symonds’ verdict after a few simulator sessions won’t rewrite history. But it does offer a glimpse of how Perez might reshape the next chapter: less about being Verstappen’s team-mate, more about being the sort of driver engineers want in the room when the problems are real and the solutions aren’t obvious yet.
