Cadillac’s Ongoing Reliability Woes Continue as Bottas Retires Early in Austin

Valtteri Bottas expressed frustration after retiring from Sunday’s United States Grand Prix, marking another disappointing performance for the Cadillac Formula 1 team. “It’s always disappointing not to finish, but it didn’t sound great from the engine side, like physically,” the Finnish driver commented.

Bottas suffered his ninth retirement of the season at the Circuit of The Americas, a surprisingly high number for a driver whose pre-2026 DNF rate was just 11%. Of those nine retirements, eight have been linked to technical problems, with this latest incident involving a suspected power-unit issue.

Valtteri Bottas, Cadillac Racing

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

“I would say it’s impossible to get a read on a year like this with so many issues,” Bottas added. “And the problem is sometimes we don’t quite understand them. So it’s really still a steep learning curve to go.”
“The biggest challenge is that there’s been lots of things in the background that maybe not everyone sees, like the brake management, the amount of having to deal with that and all these things. But at the same time, like I said, sometimes there’s been some issues that we’re struggling to see.”

Cadillac still needs to resolve its reliability and performance issues, but this may not happen until next year’s car development cycle begins.

Despite the setbacks, both cars showed glimpses of competitiveness during the race. Sergio Perez finished 20 seconds behind the leading pack of Fernando Alonso, Alexander Albon, and Carlos Sainz—a marked improvement. Bottas was actually only five seconds behind his teammate when his car failed.

“It was at times quite positive to see that we were pretty close to some other cars on pace,” Bottas noted, while Perez felt hindered by race strategy. “Unfortunately I think with the timing of the blue flags we lost a lot of race time, because as we pitted we basically went straight into the blue flags,” the Mexican explained. Data shows he was lapped on lap 28 after pitting on lap 23.

When asked about Cadillac’s relative competitiveness in Texas, the drivers offered different perspectives on why performance seemed improved.

“I think it’s very, very track-dependent,” Perez suggested. “In the race I was surprised that we were a bit closer in that regard.”

“I think today what helped was the cloud cover,” Bottas pointed out. “It was a bit cooler today, we know we are not great when it’s high temperatures, so that helped a bit. But I thought it was going to be more difficult for us here, honestly. So that’s why it’s kind of positive, and Mexico should be hopefully a bit better for us.”

While Cadillac won’t face the same level of challenge regarding downforce at Mexico’s Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, warm temperatures forecast for both qualifying and the race present another concern for the struggling team.

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