Three Bases Across Three Continents: Why Cadillac F1 Is Blocking Its Own Path

The debut season of Cadillac F1 has one very clear inflection point, and it sits at the Canadian Grand Prix. Before Montreal, the American newcomer turned heads by finishing with both cars in three consecutive races — a feat that neither Red Bull nor McLaren, two familiar front-running forces, managed over the same stretch. A start like that was enough for fans to imagine a new team that knew how to stay standing.

Then the picture flipped. Over the ten races since Canada, Cadillac has brought both Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez home together exactly twice — at the British and Italian Grands Prix. In the other eight of those ten races, at least one of their cars stopped before the finish. For a team whose cockpit holds two drivers who have each won races in the world's most prestigious series, that is the kind of statistic that forces a pause: what is happening behind the car?

The warning sign appeared at the very first race. Bottas retired; Pérez finished sixteenth. Yet in the following three rounds the team kept both cars running. That contrast between the opening and the later phase makes the story far harder to read than a simple tale of failure.

Cadillac sits bottom of the Constructors' Championship. For a rookie entrant, that position says little on its own. What deserves scrutiny is how they sit there — and the explanations now swirling around it.

Context: an ambitious project and an unusual structure

Cadillac is the Formula 1 team of TWG Motorsport. From the moment it appeared, the team positioned itself as a long-term project aimed at a championship fight, rather than a backmarker resigned to its fate. That ambition is the root of every expectation — and the root of every pressure that followed.

What sets Cadillac apart is not the car but the machine behind it. Instead of concentrating all technical operations in a single centre, following the traditional European team model, Cadillac splits its functions across three locations. Design sits at Silverstone, England — the heart of the global motorsport industry, thick with teams, suppliers and leading engineers. The aerodynamics laboratory and related operations sit in Indianapolis. Simulation, along with several other departments, sits in South Carolina.

Three time zones. Three hubs. One shared decision chain. The question is simple to ask and hard to answer: when an upgrade package needs sign-off, who has the final word, and how do the three sites stay synchronised? For a new team, the answer is not merely a technical matter, but a matter of authority and process.

One thing must be stated plainly: what is happening at Cadillac is specific to motorsport, and this is a team in its debut season. Any judgement must sit against a project still taking shape, not a machine that has run smoothly for years.

Core: when three hubs do not speak the same language

Across the whole Cadillac story there is almost no genuine technical analysis. No discussion of aerodynamic philosophy, power-unit integration, tyre degradation or setup. All that exists is results: finish counts and championship position. Every verdict on capability is inferred from results, not from the mechanism producing them.

And the single mechanism offered to explain the stall is organisational, not technical. Otmar Szafnauer — a former team principal, once in charge at Alpine — made a striking argument during a podcast appearance. He posed a hypothetical: suppose Cadillac had a car equal to Mercedes, an engine equal to Mercedes, and drivers equal to Mercedes — who would win? His answer: Mercedes. Because, in his view, a team that organises design, aerodynamics and simulation in three separate places cannot win.

This is a claim about process efficiency, not about raw capability. And it deserves serious dissection, because it points to something rarely discussed: the cost of splitting the links in a car's development chain.

To see why separation matters, one must understand a core motorsport concept: correlation. When a team develops a car, most of the work happens away from the track — in the wind tunnel, in computational aerodynamics, and on simulator systems. That data decides which upgrades reach the car. The problem is that wind-tunnel data and on-track behaviour do not always agree. When they agree, engineers call it good correlation. When they diverge, it is a correlation failure — every engineer's nightmare: an upgrade that looks beautiful in the data but delivers nothing on track.

With a three-site structure, the risk of correlation failure does not merely rise; it becomes harder to diagnose — because to find the fault, data from three places, in three time zones, must be reconciled before any upgrade can be signed off.

Picture the process. The wind tunnel and aerodynamics group in Indianapolis produces one dataset. The simulator in South Carolina produces another. The design group in Silverstone must fuse both to decide the car's final shape. Every cycle sends data across three hubs, with waiting time compounding because the time zones do not align. Upgrade lead-time stretches, and the probability of a small discrepancy slipping through the cracks rises.

The problem deepens because one of the three sites is still under construction. That means the team is operating with incomplete infrastructure in its formative seasons — precisely when synchronisation matters most. The cost of the split model is therefore not the cost of its mature version, but the cost of an unfinished one. It is a double handicap: separated and incomplete at once.

Meanwhile, another data point deserves closer reading, because both critics and defenders skip it. That is the presence of two seasoned drivers. Bottas and Pérez have both won races, both gone through seasons near the front. When a team fields two such drivers yet finishes so poorly, the probability that the cause lies in driver error falls — and the probability that it lies in the car and the organisation rises.

That is a vital inference. With inexperienced drivers, it is easy to blame a lack of experience. But when two race-winners stop so often, the question naturally turns to the machine, the process, and how the team organises its work.

Yet caution is essential. The reliability collapse — at least one car failing to finish in eight of ten races — is the heaviest data point in the whole story, but it is multi-causal and under-dissected. It could reflect fragility in the car's design. It could reflect a correlation problem between separated simulation and the track. It could be fallout from supply-chain and logistics strain across continents. Or it could simply be driver error in a debut season. Attributing everything to one organisational cause is an unproven logical leap.

Even the early phase shows a more complex picture. The fact that Cadillac finished with both cars in its first three rounds — something Red Bull and McLaren could not claim — suggests the team's basic engineering foundation is far from poor. If the base capability were weak, it could not have kept both cars running for three straight races in its debut season. This weakens the purely competence-based explanation and shifts weight toward the organisational one.

So what is really changing? The answer may not lie in absolute position, but in direction of travel. Red Bull and McLaren are noted as improving clearly after Montreal. Cadillac is regressing. It is the direction — not the position — that determines whether a structural explanation holds.

And this is where the story reaches its deepest layer: what is the project's real objective?

Szafnauer framed it sharply: if the goal is to make the team more American, then building in Indianapolis and South Carolina makes sense. But if the goal is to do everything necessary to win a world championship, then that organisation needs to be questioned. Beneath his words lies doubt about decision rights: who shapes the structure, and for what purpose?

That is perhaps the real institutional issue, rather than any cost-cap or financial-regulation story — none of which even appears in this picture. There is no revenue data, no cost figure, no driver-transfer transaction. If a genuine governance question exists, it sits here: is this project optimised for identity, or for winning?

Getting the yardstick right: a learning rookie, not a midfield team

There is a temptation when judging Cadillac: to compare them directly with midfield teams such as Aston Martin. But that yardstick is skewed. For a team in its debut season, the fair comparison is not the current position of established teams, but the learning curve of teams that once entered before. That curve is measured in years, not weeks.

In truth, Cadillac finishing bottom in its debut season is entirely predictable. The issue is not that they are last. The issue is whether the gap and the direction are narrowing. If the gap narrows, the story is one of a project progressing. If it widens, the story is one of a project losing its way — and then questions about structure become far more valuable.

Cadillac's disadvantage lies in the fact that its direct rivals are all improving. Red Bull and McLaren are noted as clearly better after Montreal, while Cadillac went backwards. When a whole group moves forward and one team moves back, the benchmark tilts against the lagging team. This is not the problem of one unlucky race, but of development cadence.

Another factor belongs in the calculation: lower-placed teams usually receive additional aerodynamic testing allowances, designed to help them close the gap. If a team enjoys that advantage yet still fails to converge, the organisational explanation gains further weight. This is a claim that must be checked against the specific regulations of the season, not assumed.

The people behind the structure: personnel risk

When a team splits its technical functions across three sites, the consequences fall not only on data but on people. The aerodynamics group in Indianapolis and the simulation group in South Carolina will easily feel placed at the periphery of the real team — the Silverstone group, at the centre of the British motorsport industry. In engineering circles, feeling cut off from the decision centre is one of the most common reasons talent walks.

A dispersed structure also makes recruitment harder. Top engineers cluster around Silverstone, where the ecosystem is complete from suppliers to nearby teams. Persuading them to move to Indianapolis or South Carolina — large American cities though they are — is not simple, for they would leave the professional community they have known for years.

And there is a subtler risk. If the structural thesis spreads internally and gains agreement, the danger of losing key technical leaders rises. Talented people tend not to stay inside a structure they themselves believe is wrong. This is a cascade risk: an external critique can trigger an internal personnel crisis.

Notably, no director, engineer or driver from Cadillac speaks anywhere in this story. That silence may be a deliberate policy of internal secrecy — but it may also signal a structure whose speaking rights are not yet clearly assigned.

The flip side of the argument: who is speaking, and to what end?

Szafnauer's argument carries professional weight. He is a veteran team principal, has run the machinery of a big team, and understands the pressure of developing a car in the most brutal competitive environment. When such a figure speaks, one must listen. But precisely for that reason, his words must be read critically.

First, he is no longer in a team-running seat. He speaks from outside, as an observer — and like any former leader, he speaks without direct accountability for the consequences of his words. That does not make him wrong, but it means his words lack the self-correcting mechanism a sitting decision-maker faces daily.

Second, and more important, Cadillac is a team once regarded as a rival to the one he used to run. A sharp critique from a former principal of a rival team should be treated as informed adversarial opinion, not a neutral audit.

Third, his argument rests on a hypothetical: assume everything is equal except the structure. But that condition never existed and is hard to verify. It is rhetorically persuasive but evidentially weak, because it isolates a single variable and assigns all responsibility to it.

There is another inconvenient point for the thesis: at present, nobody has seen the fully operational version of the three-site model. One of the three facilities is still under construction. Judging a model while it is incomplete is a timing mismatch — like criticising a house for not keeping you warm before the roof is on.

It should also be said that there is no response whatsoever from Cadillac in this picture. Every criticism comes from one side. When a severe critique is published without any countervailing voice, readers tend to internalise it as established fact. That is an asymmetry the reader must recognise.

Then there is the packaging. Putting a driver's name — Pérez, with a vast Latin American following — in the headline, while the entire critique targets organisational structure, suggests the story is built to optimise readership rather than reflect technical substance. Readers should separate headline from content when extracting information.

And there is a further problem of provenance: these reports are tied to no named publication, no date, no verifiable document. That does not make them false, but it makes them impossible to corroborate independently. In a season whose events are not yet officially recorded, the reader should keep a reasonable distance from every conclusion.

When structure becomes the scapegoat

There is a pattern easily spotted in elite sport: when a collective declines for unclear reasons, people reach for a single variable large enough to explain everything. A suspect multi-club model. A split between sporting director and coach. And here, a three-site structure.

Structure is a perfect scapegoat candidate, because it is abstract, hard to verify, and cannot defend itself. A driver can give an interview. An engineer can explain. But a structure stays silent — and that silence makes it an easy target for every attribution.

This does not mean the structural thesis is wrong. It means it must be tested more carefully, separating two problems currently conflated: the car's reliability problem and the organisation's coherence problem. The first is measured in finish counts. The second is asserted through a theoretical assumption. Blending the two and using one to prove the other is a common logical error — and it can lead to wrong conclusions simply because a plausible hypothesis sounds convincing.

Two clocks running at different speeds

One detail is easily missed: the people involved themselves have called this difficult phase part of a natural development process, even predictable. That phrasing reveals something — internally, a multi-year grace period was likely set from the outset. If so, the real short-term pressure on leadership is far lower than external criticism implies.

Here run two clocks at two speeds. One is the internal clock of patience, set to a multi-year plan. The other is the external clock of judgement, ticking race by race and column by column. The paradox is that both are right in their own way — and they will only meet at one point: when the owner decides patience has run out.

Strikingly, most of the pressure in this story is organisational, not sporting. Nobody is blamed for driving poorly. The model itself is on trial. That is an unusual configuration — and a far more interesting one than a standard results crisis.

What to watch next

Empty grandstands never stop talking to me. At a deserted circuit, you hear the engines more clearly — and you also hear the machines that refuse to work together.

If the structural thesis is right, the proof will not come from a speech, but from a sustained trend. The first metric to watch is the both-car finish rate, race by race. If it improves durably, the structural thesis weakens. If one car keeps stopping, the thesis gains ground.

The second signal is any change to the three-site layout. If Cadillac decides to consolidate design, aerodynamics and simulation under one roof, that would be an indirect admission that it has identified the coherence problem itself. Such an announcement would confirm Szafnauer's thesis after the fact.

The third signal is the appointment of a single, supreme technical authority above all three sites. The arrival of such a figure would show the team is addressing the true bottleneck — the bottleneck of decision rights, not merely of floor space.

And the fourth signal, perhaps the most important, is a clear public statement of the team's primary objective: identity or winning. Until that question is decisively answered, every decision about resources, people and location will be stretched between two poles — and the final price will still be paid in on-track performance.

A perfect victory is a notion; I tell the story of cracks. The crack here is not in the chassis, but between three sites, three time zones, and two objectives that have not yet agreed to yield to each other.

Ideals shatter, but I still sit down to write through the debris. And the question left for the season ahead is not whether Cadillac will win a title — that is far off. The question is whether a team can build a national identity and a winning machine at the same time, when the two demand different structures. If the answer is yes, we will see it on the timing sheets. If not, we will see it in the cars that stop by the roadside.