Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Valtteri Bottas said the drive-through that ruined his Miami Grand Prix was caused by a known steering-wheel button problem at Cadillac, a setback that undercut what otherwise looked like a real step forward from the team’s first major upgrade package.
Bottas was penalized for exceeding the 80 km/h pit-lane speed limit by 9.5 km/h and finished 18th, last of the classified runners. He said the issue came when he tried to activate the pit limiter but the button did not respond properly. “I pressed the pit limiter button, but apparently not hard enough,” Bottas said after the race. “We’re still lacking a bit of feedback on some of the buttons, so another error we’re still working on. It’s been a known issue, we just haven’t got the new buttons yet. Hopefully in the next race. But yeah, it’s one of the things that happens when you start as a new team.”
That problem fed into a wider theme for Cadillac in Miami. Bottas said the team is still dealing with inconsistency in the quality of its parts even as performance begins to improve. “I think we’re still struggling a bit with the quality of certain parts,” he said. “Not every part is the same that we put in the car, so there’s a bit of a lack of consistency in there, but overall, it’s getting better.”
Miami was Cadillac’s first race on American soil and the first event where it brought a significant in-season update package. The changes included a revised floor and front-wing updates, and Bottas said “the upgrades worked” even if the weekend again exposed the limits of a new operation still building reliability and consistency into its processes.
There were signs of genuine progress in the race pace. Cadillac ran close to Aston Martin again, and Sergio Perez finished 16th after splitting the two Astons, beaten by Fernando Alonso by 2.5 seconds and ahead of Lance Stroll. That gave the team evidence that the Miami package had reduced the gap to the midfield even if Bottas’ race was effectively defined by the penalty.
Cadillac team principal Graeme Lowdon said the step in performance would not change the team’s targets because the bigger task remains building the organization properly. Speaking before the Miami race weekend, Lowdon told GRANDE PRÊMIO that Cadillac had completed only three races and it was too early to set absolute goals. “The main thing now is to keep improving in terms of design, production, operation and race execution in the best way possible,” he said.
Lowdon also accepted that the inconsistencies Bottas described are tied directly to how new the team still is. “Everything is so new that it is very, very difficult to get all of the processes up to the level that we want them to,” he said. “We’re not there yet, but we will get there.”
Even so, Lowdon said Miami was a meaningful step. He said the upgrades had delivered what Cadillac expected and that more are already on the way. “We’ve made a really big step forward here in a number of areas. The upgrades have worked how we wanted them to work. We’ve got an almost constant stream of things in the pipeline,” he said, adding that the next developments are focused primarily on aero, with further weight-saving also planned.
That leaves Montreal as the immediate test of whether Cadillac can turn promise into cleaner execution. Bottas said the updated steering-wheel components should arrive for the next race, while the team’s Miami package has at least given it a platform to keep pushing toward the midfield rather than just chasing reliability fixes.