Valtteri Bottas has logged his first kilometres as a Cadillac driver. The Finn steps into the brand‑new eleventh team this year, and the Americans can put the experience and knowledge of the former Mercedes driver to good use. Bottas says Cadillac still “has a lot of problems to solve” before the season starts in Melbourne. Still, the star remains positive: “We get better every lap.”
Ten years after Haas debuted on the grid as a new team, this season it’s Cadillac’s turn. The American outfit becomes the eleventh entry in Formula 1, arriving just as sweeping regulatory changes for both the power unit and the chassis come into force. Cadillac, like the other F1 teams, completed its first proper kilometres during the shakedown in Barcelona. In total, drivers Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas crossed the start‑finish line 164 times — the second‑lowest tally of all the teams that travelled to Barcelona.
Still, Bottas was proud of the historic moment for his new employer. “It was my first time driving for the Cadillac Formula 1 team, and it was fantastic,” the veteran said in Barcelona. “We are still in the problem‑solving phase as a team. It was the first time we managed to get the car to run properly. So it was a very valuable, very important week.” Although the Finn praised the hard work from everyone at Cadillac, he was blunt: “We still have a long way to go. We still have a lot of issues to solve and a big mountain to climb, but we are getting there step by step. With every lap we improve and gel more as a team. Every lap we fix problems and make progress. So that’s good.”
Packed schedule
Cadillac will have six more days in Bahrain to continue testing the car. Until then Bottas’s schedule is already pretty full. “It’s going to be busy for the whole team between now and Bahrain,” he said after the shakedown in Barcelona. “I’ll basically go straight from here to the simulator in the United States to do some correlation work and to prepare for Bahrain. As a team we finally have a lot of data on the new car, so there’s a lot of analysis to do and maybe even new parts to build for the next test days. It’s going to be hectic, but we’ll be ready for Bahrain.”
