The problems for Cadillac now F1 reality is biting

Sergio Perez declared Cadillac's "honeymoon is over" after finishing 16th on the team's Formula 1 debut earlier this month.

That result, in the Australian Grand Prix, was one of a series of early 'wins' for the new team that was added to in China with both cars taking the chequered flag in the grand prix and Valtteri Bottas beating a car from an established rival in both qualifying and the grand prix.

Impressive as these early milestones are, it's now into the long, hard grind of "reducing that gap race by race".

The scale of the challenge of starting from scratch in the 2020s cannot be underestimated given the scale and complexity of modern F1 teams.

Despite Cadillac having almost 600 people on its books and investing heavily in facilities and equipment, to start off as a competitive backmarker is as good as it realistically ever could have been - and far better than it perhaps should have been.

The speed of the car is impressive: 5.2% off the outright pace in Australia and 4.7% in China. The 107% cutoff for qualifying is judged based on Q1 times, with Cadillac's deficits of 3.9% and 2.4% in the two main sessions so far showing how comfortable it is.

Finishing four times in six starts, including the China sprint, is also better than could reasonably have been expected. Bottas's defeat of Aston Martin's Lance Stroll in China qualifying and then of the delayed Haas of Esteban Ocon to finish 13th in the race is also at the upper end of what was ever possible.

However, there have been a litany of problems revealing the reality below the surface - and this was always going to be the case. The combination of troubleshooting the endless tiny details that established outfits take for granted having more organically developed their systems as they grew, and the need to develop the car, represents a different test to the ones Cadillac has aced so far.

"We have to be realistic about just how difficult it is," team principal Graeme Lowdon tells The Race.

"But it is really encouraging that our targets at the minute are already shifting from achieving a race finish to actually racing other teams, and that has happened much earlier than I anticipated.

"There are an awful lot of learnings that any new team is going to have to go through, and they are painful ones as well and they are ones that every single team in this paddock has gone through where we are stress-testing systems and procedures and there is no way to fast-track that.

"You can't take those from another team, we just have to do that learning ourselves. It is highly condensed and highly visible when it is a new team.

"The fact that we are effectively ticking off all of these firsts, from being able to shakedown, to testing, to completing race distances, to finishing with one car in Melbourne, it just shows that we have a really solid platform upon which to build. That has to be the target for any new team coming in.

"The challenge shifts for us now. We now know we have got a solid foundation, so now it’s up to us to build on that and that just requires a lot of hard work."

Cadillac has run into plenty of problems. In Australia, Perez described his finish as "a great recovery for the weekend [because] we started with a lot of issues", while Bottas hit clutch trouble that forced a steering wheel change at his first pitstop then retired with what is understood to be a problem related to the fuel system.

The low-pressure fuel system has presented several challenges, starting at the Barcelona test, then hitting in Australia and, for Perez, in China.

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But these have been varying issues rather than a constant recurrence of the same trouble. This system deals with the initial pick-up and delivery of the fuel before it is subjected to high pressure, and is a good example of the ongoing troubleshooting.

For it to be optimised, designs such as 'baffles' that control the distribution of the fuel in the tank through chambers and/or dividers, and the multiple low-pressure pumps that collect the fuel, must be fettled.

While parts of the fuel system are available as what's called open-source components, whereby teams can design their own but must make the design details available to all their rivals, such designs have to be modified and refined.

What's more, Cadillac didn't have access to the server containing such designs until its entry was finally accepted in March 2025. And this is just one case study; there are countless other designs that must all be worked on in parallel of parts the other 10 teams take for granted.

Given Cadillac is not following the Haas model, when it entered F1, of simply taking as many parts as are permitted from Ferrari. That multiplies the scale of the challenge it faces compared to F1's previous newcomer.

Likewise, Cadillac's working relationship with Ferrari will inevitably take time to settle.

This is complicated by the all-new power units that are confounding even works operations, so given the rapid evolution of software and settings the speed and efficiency of the two-way relationship with customers is stretched for all.

Cadillac has hit plenty of deployment problems that it has not explained, and it's reasonable to assume at least some of those will lie in terms of smoothing out those processes.

"When we were in Melbourne we had our first birthday [a year on from the entry being granted]," says Lowdon. "We are growing up in public with a lot of scrutiny and a lot of expectation.

"We carry a very well-known brand and so it is only natural to have that expectation. But everyone still has to grow; whether it is a child or a race team, you have to grow up and certain things will just happen.

"We just need to go through those. We always say every day is a school day and if we are not learning something, then we are doing something wrong. So we just keep learning, keep pushing and keep building the team."

The troubles won't vanish, and this will continue to be the case as the season goes on. On top of that, there will be myriad other details that aren't faults as such, just where there must be refinement to get the best out of the car.

Even details such as the quality of the finish of aerodynamic components can impact performance, again optimised through rigorous and sustained improvements that established rivals have long since ticked off.

General Motors holds a substantial minority stake alongside co-owner TWG Motorsports, so expectations are high in the long term. The biggest mistake both the ownership and the outside world could make would be to be impatient, because this will take time. There is now a foundation in place, and the next test that looms is how rapidly the car can be developed.

With the rate of progress expected to be rapid across the grid, simply holding station relative to its rivals would be an achievement, but the ambition is to close the gap. The car itself is tidy enough with no major vices, beyond simply not having enough downforce and therefore grip.

The Miami GP in early May will be a key point in this, as not only is Cadillac planning an upgrade but it will also have had the unexpected month off caused by the cancellation of the races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. That time off racing has its pluses and minuses for Cadillac.

"We will have some upgrades in Miami," says Lowdon. "I don't know the absolute details yet because it's likely the change in calendar will change some of that upgrade approach, and I'm sure it will be the same up and down the paddock.

"In terms of the gap, on balance it's helpful in that everything is new - systems, processes, the way everyone works together - so having that little bit of extra time to draw breath is helpful. But equally, if the races had gone ahead we were fully prepared.

"So it is not necessarily helpful or unhelpful, it is just different. The key thing is that we make use of the time as well. We do not use it to draw breath, the cadence of what we are doing continues pretty much at the same pace."

Cadillac deserves huge credit for turning up and immediately being respectable, but that's just one part of the battle.

It will take years for it to reach a position where it can realistically hope to fulfil the lofty ambitions of race wins and championship bids.

That's what Perez means by the honeymoon is over: phase one of the project has been completed successfully.

The next phase is one of the almost infinite smaller battles to fix, refine and evolve that rivals have worked through over decades.