Formula 1’s unexpected April break will be “quite beneficial” to the nascent Cadillac team, Valtteri Bottas reckons.
The Bahrain and Jeddah rounds have been cancelled due to the ongoing Iran war, meaning there will be a five-week gap between next week’s Japanese Grand Prix and the Miami race in early May.
“I think it’s actually quite beneficial for us,” Bottas commented. “We have more time to sort things out – because we still have issues, you know, we still haven’t had a trouble-free week – and also more time to gain more performance. And everyone has been working flat out for months now, so actually maybe for some people to have a bit of a breather as well, this is good.”
Cadillac has indeed suffered from a few mechanical gremlins, with nagging fuel system problems ending Bottas’ Australian GP, impacting Sergio Perez in free practice in Melbourne and ruling the Mexican out of sprint qualifying in China. At Albert Park, both drivers lost a mirror.
On the operational side, Cadillac had the second-slowest pitstops in Melbourne in terms of time spent in the pitlane; it was by far slowest in China, with its benchmark a 25.793s when Perez pitted in the sprint. Every other team was at least 2.6s faster – except Audi, which suffered from a wheelgun failure in its sole pitstop of the weekend.
Sergio Perez, Cadillac Racing
Photo by: Dom Gibbons / Formula 1 via Getty Images
But the main area for improvement will obviously be chassis-related. Cadillac opted for safety in terms of design and production deadlines ahead of its F1 debut, which allowed it to shake its maiden car down as early as 16 January – that’s 19 days earlier than the tardy Williams outfit. But there obviously was a trade-off in terms of performance.
“We anticipated, we knew that,” Perez said ahead of the Shanghai weekend. “I mean, this car was done a long time ago. It’s very basic; they had to do it very early, the sign-off. So we knew that the start was always going to be difficult.”
“Especially on the aero side, we’re lacking quite a lot of load, especially on the rear end of the car,” Bottas added, “which now has kind of boxed us in with this mechanical set-up a little bit, because we just need to do everything we can to protect the rear end. But once we start gaining some more load, then there’s a bit more to come.”
Cadillac updated its diffuser and mirror stays for the Chinese round, and there is more to come.
“We were planning to have something for almost every race now [before the Middle Eastern rounds were cancelled], so for sure something for Japan and then hopefully something bigger after the spring break,” Bottas said, chuckling at the notion of a ‘spring break’.
Additional reporting by Oleg Karpov and Ronald Vording
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