Cadillac F1 Team Shows Progress with Miami Upgrades

“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.

Sergio Perez.Icon Sportswire - Getty Images

“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.”

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.”