Cadillac looks poised to sign Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez for its first Formula 1 season in 2026.
But is that the right decision? Below you'll find our team's takes.
Knowing how far off it is matters
Scott Mitchell-Malm
Don't underestimate how much Cadillac could struggle in its first year. While this project is all about how much it can improve, and how quickly, the short-term could be very painful.
Given that reality, there is a case that Cadillac would have nothing to lose by trying to back a young driver - an Alex Dunne, Paul Aron, Jak Crawford type; or even a 'hybrid' like Felipe Drugovich or Jack Doohan. 'They could grow with the team and gain valuable experience', you might argue, 'or if making the 107% time in qualifying is really a risk, won't Cadillac need the extra tenth or two a mega-fast youngster could bring?'.
Those arguments are valid. The thing is, they also risk prioritising the wrong things, and hurting Cadillac's longer-term trajectory. Because the fact is that, yes, the right young driver could (maybe would) be faster than Bottas and Perez almost immediately. But it would be silly to write off how good those two actually are as the calibre of driver that ultimately unravelled their careers was extremely high.
Bottas and Perez should be plenty good enough to get near-as-makes-no-difference the most out of the Cadillac for the first year or two. Then Cadillac (and us) will know how far off it is. They'll have complementary, established skillsets that over a season will make it clear how good or not Cadillac's car is over one lap, on its tyres in a race, and so on, feed back on its processes, its systems, its simulator work, and every other performance aspect. Rookies are unknowns and therefore are an extra variable Cadillac can do without.
Ultimately, Cadillac won't be chasing the fine margins for a while. It would be disappointing if, by year three, it is angling for a Bottas-Perez line-up. But until then it's got to make big steps as quickly as it can. Right now, it needs all the help it can get, rather than trying to guide newcomers into F1 in an extremely challenging environment.
Cadillac needs to find its young star
Gary Anderson
For any new team coming into F1, experience on the driver front is critical. This is mainly because of the limited amount of circuit testing and the fact that a new team won’t have any previous years’ cars to allow them to optimise their operational procedures. It’s all got to be done during pre-season testing and that time will disappear very quickly. Before you know it, you will be heading off to the first race of the season.
However, with the simulation equipment that the teams need and should have it’s a little easier. So I think one experienced driver and an up-and-coming young hotshot is the right mix.
Cadillac needs to invest a year or two in finding a driver that will bring it results once the team has got on top of things. With the best will in the world, for those first two seasons, just getting the odd point on the scoreboard will be a miracle.
By the time Cadillac is ready to put its best foot forward, both Bottas and Perez will be well past their sell-by date. If you then have to start again to find that hot-shoe, it can all be a bit late and you just keep playing catch-up.
Way back in 1991, when Jordan entered F1, having Andrea de Cesaris and Bertrand Gachot as our drivers made going into prequalifying just that little bit easier. We needed them for the first half of the season. Back then, as long as you had the budget at least, you could test until you found your feet.
However, when Michael Schumacher joined for Spa, it just showed what a hot-shoe was capable of. Having him for that one race even kept Andrea honest because he only knew one thing: drive what you have to the best of your ability and don’t get too involved in trying to make a car into what you have previously been driving.
The right choice for Cadillac
Ben Anderson
This is exactly the right choice for a team in Cadillac's position.
The team expects to finish last in its first season, because of the huge amount of learning it needs to do to even try to catch up to the level of infrastructure and basic understanding of F1's nuances that the 10 established teams have already built up over (with the exception of Haas) several decades.
Then there is the added complexity of working out of multiple bases and using working practices and structures developed for space missions to the moon.
It sounds like Cadillac knows it faces an uphill struggle to be competitive - the sort of uphill struggle that could bury a promising rookie (or young American) driver.
Seasoned hands like Bottas and Perez will help Cadillac better understand its early limitations and develop technically. It also means drivers who perhaps were unfortunate to lose their most recent employment - certainly Perez's Red Bull performances look better with hindsight - get another shot.
We all like to see fresh young blood in F1 - especially given how well 2025's crop of rookies has done - but Cadillac would be the wrong place at the wrong time.
I wouldn't mind betting Bottas and Perez end up competing with each other for a single seat in a couple of seasons, when Cadillac will be a more mature outfit seeking a new barometer of outright pace, but in the meantime they are the best available line-up to begin a very difficult body of work for a brand new team debuting under brand new regulations.
Are these definitely safe pairs of hands?
Matt Beer
This will be taken by most as a wise choice of two experienced safe pairs of hands giving Cadillac known quantities in the cockpit while it builds from scratch.
But they're only known quantities if you can be absolutely confident that two drivers who've tasted proper glory can truly keep motivated over fighting each other for 21st and will return from their years off still at their best.
That's why I'm slightly surprised Cadillac isn't hedging its bets more and pairing one veteran, established but potentially rusty grand prix winner with someone younger and quite possibly faster.
There aren't any no-brainer, no-caveat options for a team in Cadillac's position. But it's gone for two sweets of the same flavour and can't be sure either hasn't passed their best-before date.
Not the time for creative driver decisions
Edd Straw
Were this any other team, signing both Bottas and Perez would be a mistake. Choosing one of them would be logical enough, capitalising on the experience and their well-proven ability of two drivers who still see F1 as unfinished business, but you would want to pair them with a younger rising star with the potential to lead the team in the long-term.
However, Cadillac is not just any team. It's a start-up operation that faces an immense challenge, one that far exceeds that faced by new teams in the days when F1 teams were smaller and more manageable. As everything is being created from scratch, the team needs experienced, proven drivers who can slot in and do a job and themselves feed into the evolution of an operation that will still be gelling long after its first race in Australia next year.
The complexity of F1 teams today cannot be underestimated, doubly so the ambitious Cadillac option that will operate across bases on both sides of the Atlantic. Impressive amounts of progress have been made already, but there's still an enormous distance for it to travel and this will be a team that is still coming together long after its first race outing in Australia next year.
There simply is not the time or the infrastructure to develop a young driver, no opportunity for TPC (testing of previous cars) running in preparation, no existing structure through which to shape them. At Cadillac, the drivers must become an integral component of shaping the team, on top of being capable performers on it. They also need to be part of the troubleshooting process, a force in creating and refining working practices when it comes to the interaction between personnel and the drivers. Visiting Cadillac's Silversotne facility and seeing the admirable progress that's been made, as well as the vast amount still to be done, has made it very clear how essential it is to have drivers with that skill set.
There will be a time for Cadillac to be more creative with its driver decisions in the future when it's established and competitive. But right now, there are no better candidates available to help it work towards that position than Bottas and Perez.
Risk-taking is sorely lacking in modern F1
Sam Smith
The choice of Bottas and Perez for F1’s newest team is as unambitious and drab as it is pragmatic and engineering-led. What happened to the boldness, distinctiveness and risk-taking with new F1 teams?
In reality that's all a bit of a misnomer for new teams at least. Haas (Grosjean/Gutierrez) and further back Jordan (De Cesaris/Gachot) prove that at least an element of conservatism is quite normal with new teams. Perhaps the 'at the time' excitement of JJ Lehto and Karl Wendlinger at Sauber in 1993 is now just a bit lost to time.
For such an investment in F1 these days risk-taking is clearly off the menu. What a shame.
What we have here is a generally uninspiring duo, although I will say that in Perez’s case, his reputation, when held up against thrusting youngsters Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda, can maybe now be positively re-appraised somewhat.
Last autumn, I suggested Cadillac should have done all it could to get Alex Palou. I stand by that. He’s the most consistently winning driver on the planet right now and he’s coming into his peak.
My other suggestion last year was, I’m sure, viewed as ludicrously left-field. Alex Lynn.
I’m sure it still is. So, what better policy to double down on it!
It's not absolutely and specifically Lynn, although since last autumn he has proved to be a standout in WEC’s most competitive ever season. It is more just the notion of bringing a risk and reward policy back to F1.
If not Lynn, what about Jake Dennis? He’s in the TWG environs, showed decently on his free practice appearance at Abu Dhabi in 2023, is an excellent sim and development driver and now a mature professional.
Neither of these suggestions will happen now or very likely in the future. But think about the big names in F1 now. They all got to their present beneficial destinations by teams taking risks on them, and that is a trait so sadly missing from F1 at present, in my opinion.
Not Cadillac's job to pick an exciting line-up
Glenn Freeman
This would be a really smart move by Cadillac. Bottas and Perez have the sort of CVs that brand new F1 teams crave: race winners with recent experience of how top teams operate.
It might not excite those who want to see new spots on the grid going to fresh faces, but that's not Cadillac's job here. That team is in a race to achieve respectability, and you're more likely to get that by signing two experienced pros who can offer a lot of guidance, advice and leadership in Cadillac's formative years.
This isn't just about what they can bring on the track but also off it. And the sooner they are through the door and working for the team, the sooner they can start making a difference. There will be a huge amount of value they can provide over the rest of 2025, before there's a car to take on track. Younger talents who some might deem more exciting wouldn't be able to bring that.
You could say that Sauber's Nico Hulkenberg/Gabriel Bortoleto partnership shows what can be done when one veteran driver is partnered with a talented rookie, but Sauber's position ahead of its rebrand as Audi is very different to Cadillac starting from zero. Sauber could afford to give Bortoleto a bit of time to get up to speed as so many parts of its F1 operation were well set even before the Audi-led scaling-up began.
A Bortoleto-type driver wouldn't get the same trajectory in his first season if he was trying to follow that path with Cadillac in 2026.
Bottas and Perez tick so many of the boxes this team needs.
Necessarily underwhelming
Jack Benyon
I really do understand that this was basically Cadillac’s only sensible option but I can’t help but be underwhelmed.
Starting with Bottas in 2017 up until last year, these drivers have at worst ‘just’ driven, and at best been crucial in developing, F1’s best cars consecutively in that period.
And yet, despite their experience being a crucial barometer for Cadillac’s development, neither is above needing a barometer to prove their pace and performance in F1 as well, given their last respective spells.
Both might have been hard done by in their respective F1 exits, but both raised enough questions that it wasn’t clear they were the best option for a reprieve. Surely the same doubts should apply in hiring them now?
Enough F2 starlets who didn’t quite win a title have proven F1 worthy in recent seasons to make that a more exciting option. Felipe Drugovich is even a go-between with plenty of experience at Aston, but the youth required to inspire a bit of exciting mystery.
That intangible hope you’ve got a future world champion on your hands and the searing pace that comes with it has escaped this line-up. One of them alongside a rookie would have been a better compromise.
But that kind of rookie isn’t blatantly obvious currently and Cadillac’s likely tough start will be supported by two drivers who will have been through worse or at least comparable adversity in their own ways previously.
It’s just such an uninspiringly dull (on track at least) line-up, especially with one eye on the future.
But it’s also a pairing too good for the performance Cadillac is likely to display, at least initially.
There is one exciting aspect...
Val Khorounzhiy
For me, the drivers making up that Platonic ideal of an F1 grid all fit into three categories: drivers currently fighting for wins and titles; drivers trying to maneouvre themselves into position to fight for wins and titles; drivers who are new to F1 and trying to consolidate their place on the grid, so that they can then focus on maneouvering themselves into position to fight for wins and titles.
Obviously, Cadillac doesn't care about that, nor should it. But, as a bystander, Bottas and Perez don't fit into any of those categories, so just aren't very interesting picks. They aren't even Nico Hulkenberg types chasing the white whale of a first F1 podium. They were, of course, good F1 drivers - but the book on Bottas's career is already written, ditto Perez's.
Or at least that's what I thought I was going to write here. And then I thought about it some more - and I would be lying if I said I'm not curious to see how Bottas and Perez compare and whether one can definitively gain the upper hand on the other, because that would mean something.
Bottas wasn't particularly interesting to have at Sauber, narratively speaking, but he was totally fine. He had good cause to feel hard done by its decision to cut him loose. And Perez's really rough last couple of years at Red Bull have now been recontextualised by the struggles of Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda.
So, beyond just eking out more F1 years and more F1 earnings, both do have the capacity to write a markedly different denouement to their time in F1. They won't win, they probably won't get onto the podium, but they do have something to prove. And they can only prove that something at the expense of one another.
Is that more exciting than getting a Dunne or a Drugovich onto the grid? Nah. But it is exciting all the same.
Pragmatism has won
Jon Noble
A Sergio Perez/Valtteri Bottas line-up for Cadillac may not suit the romanticism that an extra Formula 1 team helps open up opportunities for young drivers, but it’s by far the right call.
With the American-owned squad having had a completely clean slate choice in terms of what kind of drivers it wanted for its debut campaign, there was no end of directions it could have taken.
It would not have been insane, knowing how tough things are going to be early on in its F1 adventure, to simply think that getting the best drivers was not a priority. So instead it could have prioritised chasing those with the biggest budgets.
Or it could have been brave and used it as the chance to get some fresh talent into F1 – with there being no shortage of rising stars ready to prove themselves in the top tier.
But pragmatism has won the day, and Cadillac looks like it has taken the most sensible call it could – in getting two drivers who offer it the best chance of laying the foundations needed for that route to respectability.
They are a safe pair of hands. They both know what a winning car and team feel like. They both will be eager to make the most of the chance they have got for a second career. And they are not the kind of personalities that are going to be obsessed with stitching each other up for self-benefit at the cost of those around them.
They are wise enough to know that pushing the team forward, and thinking of the greater good, will deliver them far better results.
Cadillac knows too that it does not need to waste resources bringing a rookie up to speed, nor telling them anything about how F1 works or what is expected of them. Instead, it is a bigger boost to the squad that the download of information will be feeding the other way.
