Valtteri Bottas didn’t dress it up as anything other than what it was: Cadillac’s first proper taste of life as a Formula 1 team, and a reminder of how steep the learning curve is going to be.
The new outfit logged its opening laps at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in a three-day shakedown, with unofficial counts putting it at 164 laps all-in. For a team that didn’t exist on the timing screens a few months ago, that’s a meaningful box ticked — but it also left Cadillac with the second-lowest mileage among those running, a neat snapshot of where the project sits as 2026 begins to loom into focus.
Bottas’ verdict was blunt in the way you tend to get from him when the microphones appear and the platitudes are expected.
“It has been,” he said when the Barcelona debut was put to him as a milestone. “And also my first time driving for Cadillac Formula 1 team, and it’s great.
“I mean, it is the problem-solving phase of the team, it’s the first time we’re properly running the car. So it’s been a really valuable, really important week.”
That “problem-solving phase” line matters. When a brand-new entry turns a wheel for the first time, it’s rarely about chasing lap time; it’s about discovering the boring stuff the established teams have spent years eliminating. Systems gremlins. Correlation questions. Build quirks that only show themselves when the car is run in anger. The stuff that looks small on a spreadsheet but costs hours on track.
And even through the pride of simply making it out of the garage and around the circuit, Bottas made it clear Cadillac is still in the thick of that reality.
“I think biggest takeaways are that, well, first of all, I’m proud of everyone working so hard and being here with the car,” he said. “But also, first takeaway is that we still have a long way to go.
“We still have lots of problems to solve and a bit of a mountain to climb, but we’re getting there step by step.”
The paddock has broadly assumed Cadillac will start 2026 fighting at the back as it puts new processes in place and learns, in real time, how brutal the sport can be on anything less than complete operational sharpness. Barcelona didn’t do anything to quiet that expectation — although it’s far too early to claim any kind of competitive picture from a shakedown that, by design, is heavy on instrumentation and light on headline laps.
What Cadillac does have, though, is a driver line-up that should reduce the noise while the team builds. Bottas is paired with Sergio Perez, giving the newcomers one of the more experienced combinations on the grid by race starts. That’s not a guarantee of points, but it is insurance against the kind of self-inflicted chaos that can swallow a young team whole. When the car isn’t behaving, you want drivers who can separate “new-team weirdness” from genuine performance limitation — and who can give engineers something usable when the stopwatch isn’t the priority.
Bottas insisted the direction of travel in Barcelona was at least positive, even if the to-do list is still long.
“Each run, we’re getting better and more together as a team,” he said. “Each run, we’re solving issues and going forward. So that’s good.”
The calendar now leaves Cadillac very little time to turn first-mileage lessons into tangible gains. Like its rivals, it has two Bahrain test blocks coming up: 11–13 February and 18–20 February. That’s the real meat of pre-season preparation, the chance to put consecutive days together, understand tyre behaviour and — crucially for a new operation — rehearse the relentless rhythm of an F1 test without the comfort of low expectations.
Between Barcelona and Sakhir, Bottas is heading straight into the simulator programme in the United States, with an eye on correlation work and the sort of rapid-fire development decisions that can define an early-season trajectory.
“It’s going to be busy between here and Bahrain for the whole team,” he said. “I’m going actually pretty much straight from here to the simulator in the US, try to do some correlation work, try to prepare for Bahrain.
“As a team, we have now lots of data, finally, of the new car, so we have lots of analysis to do, maybe even build some new parts before Bahrain. So it’s going to be hectic, but we’re going to be ready for Bahrain.”
That last line — “maybe even build some new parts before Bahrain” — is the quiet tell. Cadillac isn’t treating this as a ceremonial run-up to a debut; it’s already in the cycle of finding something, fixing something, and trying to get it onto the car as quickly as the manufacturing chain allows. Established teams live in that loop. New teams have to learn to live in it, fast.
The first laps were the easy part. The hard part is what comes next: taking a modest mileage week in Barcelona, converting it into reliable Bahrain running, and then turning reliability into performance before the season starts asking questions that can’t be answered with “we’re new here.” Bottas, at least, sounds like he knows exactly what he’s signed up for.
