Seven races into its first Formula 1 season, Cadillac still has zero points. Look closer, though, and the American team's debut is trending the right way. The gap to the midfield is shrinking, the upgrades are landing where the engineers predicted, and the only thing missing is a clean Sunday.
The latest step came at Silverstone, where the team brought an aerodynamic package it had trailed for weeks. "In theory, it's a good step forward. I think we're talking a region of 10 points of downforce, which is a decent step," Valtteri Bottas said of the upgrade, before adding the caveat that has followed Cadillac all year: "A few tenths, I think, in theory. But yeah, again, we're going to see."
The race backed up the theory. "I think we have improved our pace overall," Bottas said afterwards. "At times, especially on the hard tyre, it felt like we were a bit closer to the midfield while keeping a good margin from Aston throughout the whole race." Team-mate Sergio Perez called it one of the high points of the campaign. "Overall it was a good race and probably one of our best so far this season," the Mexican said. "With just a little bit more speed we will really be in the mix with the midfield teams and then we can start to challenge a bit more."
The numbers tell the same story. In Australia, Perez qualified six tenths behind Fernando Alonso; by Silverstone, Bottas out-qualified an Alpine and lined up within half a second of the slower Haas. A car that finished three laps down in Melbourne is now racing Haas and Williams wheel to wheel.
Team principal Graeme Lowdon, who is building the Fishers, Indiana-based operation almost from scratch, has been careful to frame the progress in context. "There is real progress. In terms of race pace, accuracy of upgrade predictions, all these kinds of things that aren't seen," he said. He keeps returning to how new the team is: "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."
The stubborn problem is reliability. Both cars retired from the Austrian Grand Prix with brake fires, the latest in a run of DNFs that has cost Cadillac the very track time it needs. "It was without warning, everything was under control in free practice," Bottas said of the failure. "But on Sunday, with the slight increase in temperature and the effect of traffic, things caught fire on lap 2." His frustration was less about the result than the lost learning. "If we don't finish races, then we really can't learn much from the car and the package either. We have to finish the race, that's when we can learn."
Lowdon insists the failures are fixable rather than fundamental. "It's something that's easily preventable," he said of an earlier suspension issue. Get both cars to the flag, and the first points of the Cadillac era may not be far away.
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*Originally published on [Newsformula One](https://newsformula.one/article/cadillac-is-closing-on-f1s-midfield-if-it-can-just-finish). Visit for full coverage.*