2026 F1 Season · Through Italy · Where Cadillac F1 Actually Stands
Twelve analysed races into 2026, Cadillac still holds 10th of 11 — and the last two rounds set up the most useful comparison of the season. Monza produced Cadillac's best qualifying lap of the year (3.15% off pole, per our gap tracker). Zandvoort, one week earlier, produced one of its worst (4.51%). Measure the same two races by cornering instead of by lap time and the order flips: Zandvoort is one of Cadillac's best rounds at −2.9 km/h off the field median, while Monza is a poor −4.1 km/h — and contains the single worst corner Cadillac has recorded all season. Both cars finished at Monza, so there is no DNF caveat to hide behind. Season figures: PER −2.8 km/h, BOT −5.8 km/h below field-median apex speed, with Cadillac 0.9 km/h clear of Aston Martin and −8.0 km/h behind the field-leading Mercedes. The contradiction is the finding, and it resolves cleanly.
Through the first twelve analysed 2026 races — Australia, China, Japan, Miami, Canada, Monaco, Barcelona, Austria, Britain, Belgium, Zandvoort and Monza (Saudi and Bahrain were cancelled; Hungary omitted, see above) — we measured every driver's minimum apex speed at every detected corner, using each driver's single fastest clean lap. The metric is honest: vmin at the apex, in km/h, compared corner-by-corner against the field-median driver. Higher = better grip = more downforce; the driver who carries the most apex speed has the most car under them. Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas sit at the bottom of the 23-driver field, with PER averaging −2.8 km/h below the median apex speed and BOT −5.8 km/h. The Cadillac team rank is 10 of 11, clear of Aston Martin by 0.9 km/h. The gap to the field-leader (Mercedes) is 8.0 km/h of average minimum apex speed. Monza is the tell: its average corner gap (−4.1 km/h) is unremarkable, but the spread inside it is the widest of the season — Curva Grande at −14.1 and Ascari at −10.5, against a Parabolica that is dead level and a Lesmo 2 that is 1.6 km/h to the good. Cadillac is not uniformly slow through corners; it is slow through sustained, high-load corners, and fine everywhere else. That split reconciles the gap tracker, where Monza's straights made the lap-time deficit look like Cadillac's best of the season while the corners told the opposite story — the same illusion Spa produced in July. Britain counts: both cars finished (PER 15th, BOT 17th) and set representative clean laps, so Silverstone feeds the Cadillac averages — unlike Austria. Austria asterisk: both Cadillac cars retired very early with brake fires (PER lap 4, BOT lap 2). Neither set a representative lap, so Austria is excluded from the Cadillac season averages entirely — the rest of the field, who completed the race, do include it, which is why Pérez's corner count sits at 114 while the busiest field runners reach 139. Canada methodology note: Sergio retired on lap 39 with a smouldering chassis fire; to stop the rest of the field's lower-fuel late-stint laps from inflating their relative pace, we cap every driver's best-5-lap pool at lap 39 for Canada only. Barcelona note: Bottas retired on lap 15 — no cap there (it would discard ~77% of the race on a circuit where clean fast laps come later in the stint), but his 15-lap heavy-fuel sample is flagged. Belgium note: Pérez retired on lap 13 (rear suspension); Bottas ran the full race and anchors the team number, so no field-wide cap — but Spa is far more fuel-sensitive than Monaco or Barcelona, so a 13-lap heavy-fuel read isn't representative and PER's Belgium is excluded from his season average (the field, and the per-corner Spa table, still include it). See the methodology page for all four rationales.
Cadillac F1 is in their first season as a Formula 1 constructor in 2026, racing alongside ten established teams. Where do they actually stand? V2 of this analysis ranks every driver in the field on a single physics-anchored downforce indicator: minimum apex speed.
For each driver we pick their single fastest clean lap of the race weekend, resample its telemetry onto a uniform 5 m grid, and identify the corners as local peaks in track curvature. At each corner we read off two numbers: the minimum speed they carried through the apex, and the time they spent in the corner phase versus the straight-line phase on that lap. The driver who carries the highest minimum apex speed has the most grip — which on these new 2026 ground-effect-reduced cars correlates almost entirely with how much downforce the chassis produces.
The phase split satisfies a strict closure invariant: cornering_time + straight_time = best_lap_time, exactly. No averaging, no fudge factors. When you add the two phases back together you get the lap. Read the full methodology for detection thresholds, the throttle/brake phase-classification rule, the per-corner κ math, and what the analysis deliberately doesn't capture (banking, weight transfer, dirty air).
Season avg gap to field median min apex speed (km/h) · 23 drivers · 9 races · 92–122 corners per driver (Cadillac 114 — Austria excluded)
Antonelli holds the individual top spot, and Mercedes now leads on the team metric too. Cadillac's two drivers sit near the bottom in silver with red outlines — PER at #19, BOT at #22. The 3.2 km/h gap between PER's and BOT's apex-speed averages is consistent across races: one driver is reliably extracting more out of the same car.
Pick a race · 22 dots per corner · field median = dashed line · Cadillac silver/red
Click race tabs to switch. The dashed line is the field median for each corner — every driver below the line is losing to the field at that corner. Cadillac's silver and red dots sit below the dashed line at almost every corner of every race; the magnitude of the gap varies by corner type (low-speed hairpins are forgiving, medium-speed sweepers expose the deficit).
Each driver = one dot on best clean lap · diagonals are constant-lap-time iso-curves
Each dot is one driver's best lap. X + Y = lap time exactly (closure invariant). Drivers down-and-left have shorter total laps. Drivers up are corner-fast but straight-line-slow; drivers right are straight-fast but slow through corners. Cadillac's two silver-with-red dots sit up-and-right — slower in both phases than the field's frontrunners.
Per-corner min-speed gap to field median (km/h) · 114 corners across 8 scored races · Austria excluded (both DNF'd) · PER silver / BOT shadow
PER outpaces BOT in 75 of 114 corners (66 %). Both drivers are below the field median at most corners (bars below zero), but PER's bars are consistently shorter — he's squeezing 3.2 km/h more apex speed out of the same car. Where they invert (BOT bar above PER) is usually a corner where Bottas's experience and smoothness pays. Canada corners are sampled from the same fuel window as the rest of the field (lap 1–39); BOT's Barcelona corners come from his 15 laps before retirement, all on heavy fuel. Austria contributes nothing here — both cars were out by lap 4 with brake fires.
Median best-lap speed across the lap · pick a race · 20-driver gray hairball · Cadillac silver/red bold
The gray hairball is the rest of the 20-driver field. Cadillac's two drivers and the field median are pulled out in bold. Look for the dips — that's where the field is in corners and Cadillac's lines fall below the dashed median. The deficit is at the bottom of every dip, not at the top of the straights.
Top 12 corners across all 8 scored races (Austria excluded — both DNF'd) where Cadillac's median apex speed lags the field median most
Albert Park (sky blue) and Suzuka (red) still dominate the worst-corners list — high-load circuits where downforce deficit hurts most. The gap at the worst corner can be 25+ km/h. Monte Carlo (gold) lands just one corner on the list despite being wall-to-wall corners — at low speed the whole field is slow, and the deficit compresses. The pattern holds: the team's deficit is biggest where lateral grip matters most.
Our gap tracker measures lap time; this page measures cornering. On the last two rounds they point opposite ways. Monza gave Cadillac its best qualifying gap of 2026 (3.15%) but a poor cornering deficit (−4.1 km/h). Zandvoort, a week earlier, gave a bad qualifying gap (4.51%) but one of the year's best cornering readings (−2.9 km/h). Both are true because the circuits ask different questions: at Monza the cars spend about 31% of the lap time cornering, at Zandvoort about 58%. A car short of downforce loses in every corner either way — but at Monza there are only eight, and the straights hand the time back. Monza wasn't progress. It's a circuit that hides the problem.
If Monza looked like a good weekend, look at where the time went. Curva Grande — long, fast, heavily loaded — is 14.1 km/h below the field median, the largest single corner deficit Cadillac has recorded in 2026. Ascari costs another 10.5 and 6.9 km/h across its two phases. Yet Parabolica is level with the field and Lesmo 2 is 1.6 km/h to the good. That is exactly what a downforce shortfall looks like: fine where the corner is short, bleeding wherever load has to be carried for a sustained period. Zandvoort says the same in miniature — worst at the banked Gerlachbocht (−8.2) and T11 (−8.0), best at Hans Ernst (+1.7).
Cadillac stays 10 / 11, 0.9 km/h clear of Aston Martin. Both cars finished at Monza, so the latest numbers carry no DNF asterisk. Season figures: PER −2.8 km/h, BOT −5.8 km/h below field-median apex speed, with Bottas back at the bottom of the driver table on 22 / 23 and Pérez holding 19th. The gap to the field-leading team, Mercedes, is −8.0 km/h.
Austria's story wasn't downforce, it was brake fires. Both MAC-26s retired inside four laps — PER on lap 4, BOT on lap 2 — before either set a representative clean lap. A two-lap, full-fuel, cold-brake sample tells us nothing about the car's cornering pace, so Austria is asterisked and excluded from the Cadillac season averages. The field, who ran the full distance, still counts it.
Spa splits cleaner than any track this year. At the slow corners — La Source, the Bus Stop chicane — Cadillac is level with the field or quicker, which flatters its average Belgium gap (−4.6 km/h) to a hair inside Silverstone's. But at the fast, downforce-hungry corners it posts the biggest single-corner deficits of the season: Eau Rouge / Raidillon (−16 and −12 km/h) and Pouhon (−16.5 km/h), all taken well north of 250 km/h. That's the aero shortfall with nowhere to hide — and it's why Spa flattered the lap-time gap tracker (long straights) while exposing the car through the corners.
PER outpaces BOT in 66 % of detected corners (75 / 114) and averages 3.2 km/h more apex speed across the field. Same car, same setup, same engineers — Perez is extracting more out of the platform than Bottas. With this kind of car, that 3.2 km/h is meaningful.
This isn't a power-unit story or a setup story. The phase split shows Cadillac's slowest moment is consistently the apex, on every track type, against every team. The car needs more downforce. Eight races in, the picture is unchanged — and Barcelona, the truest aero test on the calendar, still confirms it loudest (Austria was lost to brake fires before either car could run).
Monza was the least demanding aerodynamic exam on the calendar and it still produced the worst single corner of Cadillac's season. Two circuits ahead will test the reading properly. Sepang (R16) returns for the first time since 2017 — two long straights bolted onto a genuinely demanding middle sector, so it should land between the Monza and Zandvoort extremes, and nobody on the grid has current-car data for it (our circuit guide). Then Singapore (R17): 19 corners, no straight worth the name, and a lap that is almost entirely direction change. If Monza's qualifying result was a genuine step rather than a circuit artifact, Marina Bay is where it would have to show. On this page's evidence, we would not expect it to — and that is a falsifiable prediction, which is the point of measuring rather than guessing. We'll re-run the pipeline after each race.