Sergio Perez: Cadillac operationally still lacking a lot and progress slow in terms of performance

In what is honest, no holds barred assessment of Cadillac's problems in this their first season in Formula 1, Perez told F1.com what issues face the American team after the Canadian Grand Prix.

"We managed to recover, we had some good pace out there, with fights with Haas," Perez reflected after his race ended prematurely with a suspension failure. We overtook the Haas, and unfortunately we had a suspension failure at the end, so yeah, that was it.

"It's something that we have to understand and get on top of, because it's not ideal what is happening and what has happened. It's something we need to investigate and hopefully come on top of."

The Mexican veteran then delivered a blunt assessment of where Cadillac stand five races into their maiden Formula 1 campaign: "I think operationally we're still lacking a lot, and we are not making the progress we are making in terms of performance, so we have to be able to maximise the car performance at the moment."

Perez's comments underline the challenge facing Cadillac. While the car has shown encouraging signs of development, the team continues to suffer from the inevitable growing pains of a new Formula 1 operation. Montreal provided evidence of both.

Perez qualified strongly for the Sprint and then fought his way to an impressive P11 on the road, holding off quicker rivals and demonstrating that Cadillac are beginning to close the gap to the established midfield teams.

"It was enjoyable," Perez said. "When you are over-delivering weekend in, weekend out, that's something quite nice. I'm very happy with my performances, with my level of driving. I'm happy I came back and proved it to myself that I'm one of the best out there. So that to me is really nice, and I'm very happy with the level of driving I'm doing."

Those performances have become increasingly important for Cadillac as they continue to build their Formula 1 programme around the experienced Mexican and former Mercedes driver Valtteri Bottas.

The Canadian Grand Prix itself became another example of the gap between raw pace and execution.

Like McLaren, Audi and Carlos Sainz, Cadillac gambled on intermediate tyres for the start of Sunday's race. The decision backfired almost immediately as the circuit dried more quickly than anticipated.

"It was honestly 50:50 at that point," Perez explained. "We took the gamble at that point. I felt like it stopped raining a little bit less, and it became a lot clearer that we were on the wrong tyre very early on, within three laps, we killed the inter, and that was the biggest issue out there.

"The lap to grid laps, they felt like 50:50. It was really hard to choose a tyre. And then when we went on to the race with so many aborts, the rain just calmed down quite a bit, and it was a lot clearer for the slick tyre."

Even after the wheel setback, Perez recovered strongly and was battling Haas before the suspension failure ended his race.

Team principal Graeme Lowdon believes the incident was an isolated issue rather than a fundamental design weakness: "It looks like a whole combination of things, so it's not something that we think there'll be a repeat of. It's just a particular scenario, a particular chain of events from what I've seen.

"We've seen plenty of teams have these things in the past, and it does typically tend to be a combination of circumstances. And it looks as if that's a kind of unusual chain of events that's led to it that have happened in a particular sequence. It's something that's easily preventable" Lowdon explained.

Despite Perez's frustrations, both driver and team acknowledge that Cadillac are moving forward. The squad arrived in Formula 1 facing a mountain of challenges, from race operations and strategy execution to reliability and development processes. Those areas remain works in progress, but the pace deficit has started to shrink.

"There is real progress," Lowdon insisted. "In terms of race pace, accuracy of upgrade predictions, all these kinds of things that aren't seen. Clearly the objective is to try and bring all the elements together and get meaningful progress on the track."

"We just saw some real steps forward, both in the Sprint race and also today. Obviously, our fun got cut short a bit, but we were fighting with the Haas, and so we're just getting into different territory every race," added Lowdon.

That progress now heads to Monaco, where Perez famously won for Red Bull in 2022. The Mexican remains optimistic that Cadillac's improving performance can allow them to fight further up the order: "Especially in the Sprint events, a lot of things can happen, people not maximising their performances, and we can be in the mix.

"So we just have to keep finding performance, and operationally, we just have to keep doing our job. I think that Monaco is just Monaco. It's a one-off. So hopefully we can be really strong there," Perez concluded. 

Cadillac's dilemma is that car performance is improving faster than team execution. Perez believes though the car is becoming increasingly competitive, but not fast enough and operational mistakes, strategy decisions and reliability issues are preventing the team from fully capitalising on that progress.