Lowdon hails ‘real progress’ for Cadillac after battles with Haas in Canada

Montreal was just the fifth race weekend for the all-new Cadillac Formula 1 team, and there were some positive signs as the Silverstone outfit continue to make progress.

In Saturday’s Sprint, Sergio Perez was able to fight with cars that in reality should have been ahead of him, the Mexican crossing the line in an unexpected P11 before a penalty dropped him back.

However, as is inevitable for such a new organisation, there were also a few hiccups as the learning curve continues and a front suspension failure for Perez in Sunday’s Grand Prix was a very public sign that work needs to be done. Nevertheless, the overall verdict is that the trend is upwards.

“It was good, and it showed progress,” Team Principal Graeme Lowdon told F1.com after the flag.

“We know we've still got a lot to do in a lot of areas, and this is only our fifth weekend of Grand Prix racing, so we're doing so many things for the first time that other teams have been doing for a long, long time.

“But that's why it's important to identify both the positive areas, and the areas that we need to work harder on as well.”

On the plus side, Perez was as high as P17 in Sprint Qualifying. He was helped by a couple of drivers not participating, but nevertheless he was just 0.130s off making it into Q2 – something that didn’t look likely a few races ago.

Then in the Sprint itself he made a good start and moved up to P11, holding off a group of potentially quicker cars with a brilliant defence.

He was a bit too aggressive in the eyes of the FIA stewards, who handed him a 10-second penalty for a move on Liam Lawson that dropped him three places. Nevertheless, he had made a point.

“It was enjoyable,” the Mexican said. “When you are over-delivering weekend in, weekend out, that's something quite nice.

"I'm very happy with my performances, with my level of driving. I'm happy I came back and proved it to myself that I'm one of the best out there. So that to me is really nice, and I'm very happy with the level of driving I'm doing.”

It was more complicated for Valtteri Bottas, who wasn’t comfortable with his car on Friday, and dropped out of parc ferme to make changes for the Sprint – which meant that he had a car that felt very different.

In the main event both Perez and Bottas had their races compromised by joining McLaren, Audi and Carlos Sainz in choosing intermediate tyres at the start. That led to early pit stops for both.

“It was honestly 50:50 at that point,” Perez said of the tyre choice. “We took the gamble at that point. I felt like it stopped raining a little bit less, and it became a lot clearer that we were on the wrong tyre very early on, within three laps, we killed the inter, and that was the biggest issue out there.

“The lap to grid laps, they felt like 50:50. It was really hard to choose a tyre. And then when we went on to the race with so many aborts, the rain just calmed down quite a bit, and it was a lot clearer for the slick tyre.”

"We were predicting a big mess on the first lap,” said Bottas. “So maybe we could have capitalised with the inters at least by staying on track. But that rain kind of faded away pretty quickly. I think it was worth trying.”

Subsequently Perez gained ground and had a good battle with the Haas of Esteban Ocon before the failure occurred – fortunately at a place on the track where he was able to head safely into the pit lane.

“We managed to recover, we had some good pace out there, with fights with Haas,” he said. “We overtook the Haas, and unfortunately we had a suspension failure at the end, so yeah, that was it.

“It's something that we have to understand and get on top of, because it's not ideal what is happening and what has happened. It's something we need to investigate and hopefully come on top of.

“I think operationally we're still lacking a lot, and we are not making the progress we are making in terms of performance, so we have to be able to maximise the car performance at the moment.”

After the race Lowdon noted that the initial investigation suggested that it was a one-off issue that won’t be repeated, rather than any inherent fault.

“It looks like a whole combination of things, so it's not something that we think there'll be a repeat of,” said the team boss. “It's just a particular scenario, a particular chain of events from what I've seen.

“We've seen plenty of teams have these things in the past, and it does typically tend to be a combination of circumstances. And it looks as if that's a kind of unusual chain of events that's led to it that have happened in a particular sequence. It's something that's easily preventable.”

Bottas meanwhile finished Sunday’s race in a distant P16, and while encouraged by his team mate’s overall performance, he was clearly frustrated.

“It was a tough day out there with the balance today,” he said. “The car was over-rotating everywhere, oversteering, and I was fully locked with the diff and everything, and we just couldn't cure it. So need to have a look what went wrong there

"We've had a few issues this weekend with set-up, like the car has been very different in each session. And even today there were some things that we couldn't fix. So the car is not 100% for sure, it's not yet in a place that I can gain good confidence with the car. But also we know that my car was 100%.”

It was far from a perfect weekend, but the trend at Cadillac is positive.

“There is real progress,” said Lowdon. “In terms of race pace, accuracy of upgrade predictions, all these kinds of things that aren't seen. Clearly the objective is to try and bring all the elements together and get meaningful progress on the track.

“We just saw some real steps forward, both in the Sprint race and also today. Obviously, our fun got cut short a bit, but we were fighting with the Haas, and so we're just getting into different territory every race.”

Next stop is Monaco, a race that Perez won with Red Bull in 2022. He goes there knowing that he has a car that – if everything comes together – can at least allow him to fight with others.

“I think so,” he said. “Especially in the Sprint events, a lot of things can happen, people not maximising their performances, and we can be in the mix. So we just have to keep finding performance, and operationally, we just have to keep doing our job.

“I think that Monaco is just Monaco. It's a one-off. So hopefully we can be really strong there.”

“It's one of those races where defending is fairly easy,” said Bottas. “But the question is, how do we get ahead of the cars? We'll try to find a way.

“It's a unique track. If you get things right, there can be an opportunity, and I look forward to it. And I believe we've again got some new bits for that race as well, so let's see.”