Valtteri Bottas has revealed some of the reasons behind his woeful lack of pace compared to Cadillac Formula 1 team-mate Sergio Perez last time out in Baku.

Bottas was on average over a whopping 1.7 seconds slower than Perez per lap at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, the largest race day intra-team deficit of 2026 so far. Even his single fastest lap was 1.489s slower than Perez.

Bottas ended up in the wall on the final lap as his car’s deployment pattern “got a bit confused” because he went down the Turn 1 escape road, then because of the extra distance travelled his rear brakes didn’t work going into the Turn 15 left-hander, where he nosed into the barriers.

But what was more worrying was the alarming lack of pace before then, with Perez close to lapping Bottas before the latter’s crash.

“I understand it looked pretty bad from the outside and felt pretty bad in the car as well,” Bottas said on Thursday in Malaysia.

“There was just no way to keep up with the pack. I tried everything during the race, and got lots of feedback on where I am losing the time. A lot of it was on the straights, but also a big chunk was just all around the lap in the corners.

“That’s why I just kept pushing until the end and that’s why I had to lock up on the last lap into Turn 1.

“But yeah, the main thing was we saw already in practice that I was lacking pace. I couldn’t carry the same speed through the corners as Checo, so we changed a lot for the qualifying, including some dampers and the floor, and it actually felt a lot better.

“But then the ride again during the race degraded quite a lot… Again, we’ve changed a lot of things, so I think it’s something to do with dampers degging with heat, the floor… We are still lacking a bit of pressure tappings here and there, so we still don’t have the full information on aero parts that I’m used to from the past.

“You can immediately see if you’re down or up, but now there are some bits of the floor where we are blind. But for me, feeling-wise, it was more the ride – that, in combination with the power steering that was degging throughout the weekend. So I was really then also struggling to feel the car throughout the race.

“So those things combined. And then the [power unit] difference was probably bigger than we thought, at least from the data.

“We’ve got a number in theory, but that’s new engine versus new one, of the new and old spec. So yeah, I think those combined. I was pretty slow.”

‘50/50’ if Bottas gets Ferrari ADUO 2

The power unit difference is in reference to Perez having the upgraded ADUO 2 Ferrari engine in Baku while Bottas doesn’t yet have it.

This was previously described as a “small difference”, but as Bottas says the upgrade may be more powerful than first thought.

Bottas says it’s “50/50” if his ADUO 2 engine arrives in time for him to run it at Sepang; if not, he’ll have to wait until next week in Singapore.

Team-mate Perez won’t be running it this weekend, swapping to a different power unit in his pool in order to save it for a weekend when it will be more beneficial.

“We took a decision where we feel we got the best shot at it,” Perez explained.

“That’s why we’re taking a bit of a hit here. But we hope that it will pay us back.

“We are not too optimistic about this weekend. So we decided to save it.”

As Perez alluded, the Cadillac drivers are braced for a difficult weekend because Sepang poses two challenges the Cadillac struggles with in particular: tyre overheating and high-speed corners.

As Perez explains, the Cadillac has “a massive lack of load in the car and a lot of drag” right now.

“In Baku, I basically stayed on the overtake mode for the entire race and therefore I was able to stay with the others,” Perez said.

“But when I overtook them, I was just a passenger because I had no straightline speed. So we have two big issues: load and a lot of drag.

“But we always knew this first year was going to be tricky.”