Cadillac ventured to US soil for the first time as a Formula 1 team, with a prominent presence at the track and in downtown Miami, and on-track there were further encouraging signs.
Cadillac had another race weekend battling with the Honda-powered Aston Martin team, with Fernando Alonso beating Perez to 15th place by just 2.5 seconds. Perez beat the other Aston of Lance Stroll, who was a further five seconds back, while a compromised Valtteri Bottas was last of the 18 classified runners. His race was compromised by a drive-through penalty for pit lane speeding, a consequence he said of not pushing the limiter button hard enough, a known issue with the steering wheel.
Related Story
Cadillac also introduced its first major upgrade package of the season, with the MAC-26 featuring updated front wing flaps and end plates, a new floor, new floor boards, and a new rear brake drum.
“I think we can take an awful lot of positives from this weekend,” Team Principal Graeme Lowdon told Autoweek. “We know F1 is a constantly developing race, we brought some big upgrades to the track this weekend and it looks as if most if not all of that is working, so there’s a big weight saving program on the car, some significant aero upgrades, and we saw some real positives from that.”
Icon Sportswire//Getty Images
Cadillac’s main weakness compared to Aston Martin was its inability to work the soft tire, while the MAC-26 also suffered from higher degradation on the harder tire around the smooth low-grip Miami surface.
“One of the short-term things we need to do is hard tire deg,” Perez said. “We have some ideas there.”
Perez battled with the tail-end of the midfield during the early stages of Saturday’s Sprint Race, and that glimpse of action provided further encouragement.
“One of the short-term things we need to do is hard tire deg. We have some ideas there.”
“I’m confident, we’re heading in the right direction, I can see as soon as the deg starts to keep enough we can be with them, the midfield, but they are just able to pick up the pace quite a lot. It’s still a long season, but obviously we are in a massive hurry to find performance, as we know Aston is going to be improving and we don’t want to be left behind.”
The high point results-wise of the weekend came during Sprint Qualifying. Perez was only 19th, but he within three tenths of a second of making SQ2—the closest Cadillac has been to a non-Aston Martin opponent. That was despite the Mexican being called to the weighbridge after his first timed lap, and the delay meant Cadillac had insufficient time to refuel the car, denying him a second run that would have been in more optimal track conditions.
Icon Sportswire//Getty Images
Sergio Perez.
“It was just a combination of operational things, being squeezed by some real-life things like the weighbridge,” Lowdon said. “We’re not using that as an excuse: you have to factor that in, but it squeezes the margins, so there were a couple of things there if we had operated a little bit neater then we could have been through to SQ2, and in only our fourth ever event would have been a massive external boost.
“All that said, none of that performance improvement goes away, we’re going to build upon that, and in terms of procedural improvement we’ll build on it. We have to remember this is grand prix number four, and teams have been doing this for decades and decades, and some for over 1,000 grands prix, and it really does make a difference.”
Related Story
Cadillac posted the seventh-best pit stop time during the race of 2.73 seconds, a turnaround Perez hailed as “amazing,” with a proud Lowdon agreeing that “if we’re doing that kind of performance reliably as a new team, with all of the new systems, that’s another step forwards.” It was Cadillac’s first ‘live’ race pit stop, as during previous grands prix it stopped under cautions.
Next on the agenda remains constant refinement across all areas. Cadillac deliberately readied its MAC-26 earlier than some of its rivals, with a relatively basic aero philosophy, to ensure it had a baseline, meaning there is still substantial low-hanging fruit.
“There’s a lot more still in the pipeline for this car, there’s so many areas we feel that we can make a step forward, and we will be doing so as well,” Lowdon said. “We’ve got a very, very busy upgrade schedule planned. There’s still some fairly big stuff still to come, so keep an eye out on them; Ferrari brought the most number of upgrades here, I think we were second, and there’s going to be more of that to come. There’s a lot of areas where we just want to constantly make step forwards.
“I think we can go away from our first home grand prix really encouraged.”
U.K.-based Phillip Horton started covering Grands Prix while still at university and swiftly deemed that writing about Formula 1 and the behind-the-scenes machinations was much more engaging than reading centuries-old novels. Degree gained, he went on to cover the sport full-time from 2014 and is as intrigued and excited by the destinations Formula 1 visits during its lengthy annual world tour as the racing itself. Phillip joined Autoweek in 2021 and while he has just about learned to spell in American English he has yet to find anywhere in America that makes a proper cup of tea.