Why Cadillac’s F1 development struggles demand action
Sergio Perez says Cadillac must overhaul its processes as the American newcomer sits pointless after 11 rounds of the 2026 season.
The Cadillac F1 development struggles in 2026 have reached the point where the team’s own driver is demanding a structural rethink, not just faster upgrades. Sergio Perez did not mince words after 11 rounds of racing left the American outfit rooted to the bottom of the constructors’ standings, pointless and outpaced by a team, Aston Martin, that had itself been written off at the start of the season.
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Perez lays bare Cadillac’s F1 development struggles
“We obviously have to rethink all our processes to make sure that we are able to develop a lot stronger, because in Formula 1 it is all about developing,” Perez said. “I think it is what we are lacking a bit.”
That is not a driver grumbling about lap times. That is a driver telling the engineers, the strategists, and the board that the entire production pipeline is broken. Blunt. Public. Significant.
Cadillac is bottom of the standings and without a point after 11 rounds, scrapping at the back of the pack. The team’s approximate 2.5-second gap to the front has remained constant despite continuous updates to the MAC-26, including a significant package in Austria. Bringing updates is not the problem. Making them work is.
Why the third-party problem cuts deeper than it looks
Here is the detail most casual coverage misses. Cadillac’s F1 development struggles in 2026 are not just about raw pace. They are a structural consequence of how the team is built.
Being a new team, Cadillac is still relying on buying some parts from other companies rather than making everything itself. “It is a little bit of inefficiency and obviously a lack of development because a lot of it is done through third parties, so we don’t control much of it,” said Perez.
That dependency has a compounding effect. When a rival team validates an upgrade in the wind tunnel and manufactures it in-house, the feedback loop is tight. For Cadillac, every step involving an external supplier adds latency. The upgrades have not had the same impact as those brought by rival teams, with Aston Martin in particular leapfrogging ahead of Cadillac using a B-spec chassis in Hungary. That gap is no longer just about funding or experience. It is about process control, and Perez knows it.
Budkowski arrives, but the clock is already ticking
The summer break brought the most dramatic development of Cadillac’s short F1 life. Cadillac sacked team principal Graeme Lowdon and replaced him with Marcin Budkowski, with the team remaining the only outfit yet to score a point across the first 11 rounds of 2026. Budkowski’s most recent F1 role ended when he left his position as Alpine executive director in 2022.
The 49-year-old Polish-French engineer’s first race in charge is the Dutch Grand Prix, with the season resuming at Zandvoort from August 21-23.
While Cadillac described the move as a “planned leadership transition”, CEO Dan Towriss later revealed that Lowdon had not agreed to the change and was only informed of the decision on Wednesday morning. That is a clean-break sacking dressed in diplomatic language. The paddock noticed.
You can follow more detail on the fallout from this decision in our piece on Cadillac’s leadership crisis. Budkowski brings genuine technical credibility, but credibility does not close a 2.5-second gap before the season ends.
Anderson’s verdict: “I expected more from Cadillac”
Technical analyst Gary Anderson has been one of the most forensic observers of Cadillac’s F1 development struggles across the season. His assessment going into the second half is pointed.
“I don’t want to be overcritical, and these cars are exceptionally complex,” Anderson wrote. “But the last new team, Haas, started its first campaign in 2016 on a much stronger footing. Both have a relationship with Ferrari and even though Haas took far more Ferrari components for its debut, I still expected more in-season progression from Cadillac.”
Anderson also flagged a specific technical failure that crystallised the team’s risk management problem. Cadillac’s brake overheating problems led to both cars retiring early from the Austrian Grand Prix. Brake problems, he noted, are never just brake problems. For a new team, that is not the right risk to take, as the priority should be to finish races. You learn far more from finishing than from squeezing out a tiny aerodynamic gain and then cooking the brakes.
What Cadillac must do to survive the second half
Perez, at least, is not demanding miracles. “I would think that the team will keep pushing for a few more upgrades to come to make sure that we are able to at least show to ourselves that our development process is strong. That will give us a lot of confidence going forward.”
The priority for Budkowski is clear: finish races, gather data, and rebuild the internal feedback loop so upgrades actually register on the timing sheets. Cadillac remains the only team yet to score points in the 2026 season, with Valtteri Bottas’s 13th-place finish in China standing as their best result to date. Thirteenth place as your best result in 11 rounds tells you all you need to know about the Cadillac F1 development struggles in 2026.
The Budkowski hire is the right call on paper. A technically literate team principal who knows how to structure an engineering department is exactly what a team with process problems needs. But Cadillac’s development struggles will not be fixed by a single appointment, and Perez’s comments make clear he understands that too. The challenge now is translating honest self-assessment into lap time.
With the Dutch GP at Zandvoort kicking off the second half of the season, keep across the full picture of who strikes first after the summer break right here on rnt-motorsports.com.
