Racing
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Valtteri Bottas said Cadillac’s latest attempt to solve its recurring brake fires failed at the Hungarian Grand Prix, where overheating in the brake system led to a complete loss of braking and forced him to stop the car against the wall.
The problem was especially damaging because Cadillac had arrived at the Hungaroring with new front brake ducts intended to prevent another fire. Instead, the issue returned in the race, leaving Bottas to conclude that the team still has not found enough cooling capacity. He said the new ducting was “trying to address this issue and trying to prevent it from happening, but clearly we still need more airflow in the brakes.” He added that Hungary had been “quite extreme conditions” on “an extreme track.”
Bottas also gave the clearest explanation yet of what is actually going wrong inside the system. Speaking after the race, Valtteri Bottas said, “the brakes, they just get too hot, and it gets to the point that inside everything starts to burn.” Once that happens, he said, the damage spreads through the system until braking performance disappears entirely.
That is what happened at the end of his run in Hungary. Bottas said that on the in-lap he “lost the brakes fully because I think the brake lines must have burned. So, that's why I had to stop the car against the wall.” In another account of the incident, he said hitting the wall was effectively the only way left to bring the car to a halt once the brakes became completely ineffective.
Hungary was not an isolated failure but the latest in a season-long pattern for Cadillac. The team has dealt with intermittent brake fires through the 2026 campaign, and Austria had already exposed the severity of the issue when both cars retired in the early laps with the same problem. That made the latest setback more significant than a single race retirement, because the update brought to Budapest was supposed to be a direct answer to an already established weakness.
The timing also leaves Cadillac little room to react quickly. Formula 1 now heads into its mandatory 14-day factory shutdown before the Dutch Grand Prix, limiting what the team can do before Zandvoort. Bottas said he is not expecting much in the way of visible upgrades when the championship resumes. “I don't think we'll have anything for Zandvoort,” he said.
He left open the possibility of a targeted brake fix, but not a broader step forward in performance. “Well, hopefully something for the brakes, but nothing performance-related,” Bottas said. That underlines where Cadillac is now: still chasing a basic solution to keep the car running before it can think about making it faster.
The longer this continues, the more it shapes the team’s wider development plan. Bottas said there will come a point when Cadillac has to stop pouring effort into the current car and switch fully to the future, adding: “But at some point, there's going to be a point that we're going to focus 100% for next year.”