Cadillac’s troubled Formula 1 debut reached another low at the 2026 Hungarian Grand Prix, where Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez were both forced to retire at the Hungaroring. The American team has now completed the first 11 races of its inaugural season without scoring a point, while accumulating nine retirements.
Cadillac’s long-running effort to join the Formula 1 grid as its 11th team finally resulted in a debut this season. It would have been reasonable to expect the newcomer’s performances and results to fall short of those achieved by the leading teams, but few would have anticipated such a disastrous opening—particularly with drivers of the calibre of former Mercedes racer Valtteri Bottas and former Red Bull driver Sergio Perez. Instead, the first half of Cadillac’s 2026 campaign has proved deeply disappointing.
Cadillac F1 reaches summer break with zero points
Across the opening 11 races, the Ferrari-powered MAC-26 has never finished inside the top 10, making Cadillac the only team yet to score a World Championship point. Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez consequently also remain scoreless in the 2026 Formula 1 drivers’ standings.
The team has recorded nine retirements in total, with neither Cadillac reaching the chequered flag in Hungary, repeating the double DNF suffered in Austria. The final Hungarian Grand Prix classification therefore provided another painful illustration of Cadillac’s reliability problems.
Brake overheating ends Valtteri Bottas’s Hungarian GP
Valtteri Bottas was the first Cadillac driver to retire after suffering a brake problem. His 13th-place finish in China remains the team’s best result of the season.
“Unfortunately, my race ended because the brakes overheated,” Valtteri Bottas explained. “It’s a shame because we had made changes to the brake cooling system, but they weren’t enough due to the extreme conditions and the nature of this circuit. It’s another lesson for us as a team, and we’ll use the week before the summer break to try to resolve the issue so that it doesn’t happen again. There are still positives to take from this weekend, as we were closer to Williams than we have been in the past. It has been a challenging start to the season, as expected for a new team, but we have many moments to be proud of and many more to look forward to in the second half of the year.”
Suspension failure forces Sergio Perez to stop
Sergio Perez’s race also ended prematurely. Approaching lap 50, the Mexican driver was forced to pull into the run-off area after suffering a suspension failure. Although Sergio Perez found the car easier to manage during his second stint, he had already sensed that something was wrong.
“It was a challenging race. I struggled a lot with the balance in the first stint and had problems with sliding, but I managed to adapt my driving and the second stint went much better,” Sergio Perez said. “I still felt that there was something wrong with the car, so it’s important to understand exactly what was happening. As a new team, we expect to face challenges, but it’s frustrating to have experienced several problems recently. We’ll use next week, before the shutdown period, to work hard in every area and make sure we return stronger for the second half of the season.”
The summer break will give Cadillac an opportunity to investigate its brake, suspension and performance problems before Formula 1 resumes. After a first half of the season without points or a single top-10 finish, the team’s immediate priority will be converting the lessons from its difficult debut into greater reliability and stronger results.
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