A brand-new team starts a long way back. Eleven rounds in, the real question is simple: is Cadillac actually closing the gap to the front — or just visiting shorter circuits? Each chart now answers it two ways: the raw deficit in seconds (left axis, solid) and the same gap as a percentage of the benchmark lap (right axis, dashed), which strips track length out of the trend. Belgium looked like a breakthrough. Hungary, one week later, took it back.
Every session, someone sets the benchmark — pole in qualifying, the fastest lap in the race. These charts track how far the best Cadillac was off that benchmark, round by round. Lower is better. A raw gap in seconds is easy to read but flatters short tracks — 2.7s off a 66-second Red Bull Ring lap is a bigger relative deficit than 2.7s off a 92-second Shanghai lap — so each chart also plots the gap as a percentage of the benchmark (the dashed line, right axis). Where the solid and dashed lines disagree, that's track length talking.
Both deficits on one chart, Grand Prix by Grand Prix. Solid lines are seconds (left axis); dashed lines are the same gap as a % of the benchmark lap (right axis). In seconds, both fell from about four toward the high-2s by mid-season — a clear "closing" shape. But the dashed % lines are much flatter: normalize for track length and the deficit has mostly held a steady band. That gap between the two shapes is the whole question.
Pole (the fastest qualifying lap of the weekend) minus the quicker of the two Cadillacs, for each Grand Prix. This is main Grand Prix qualifying only; sprint-shootout times are tracked separately on the Results page.
In seconds, the one-lap deficit fell from about 4.1s in Australia to a low of 2.70s at Monaco, then drifted back up — 3.12s at Silverstone, 3.46s at Belgium, 3.68s in Hungary. Read the dashed % line and the two lenses split hard. Belgium's 3.46s is only 3.32% of Spa's enormous 1:44 lap — Cadillac's best relative qualifying lap of the season. One week later at the Hungaroring, a shorter 3.68s is 4.77%, the season's second-worst behind Australia. Same car, seven days apart, opposite verdicts: that spread is track length talking, not development. Since China the relative gap has held a 3.3–4.8% band with no downward slope.
The field's fastest race lap minus Cadillac's fastest, for every Grand Prix and sprint. Where no Cadillac was still running late on (Austria, Hungary), comparing Cadillac's heavier-fuel laps to the field's late low-fuel best would be meaningless — so for those races the field's fastest is capped to the laps Cadillac actually completed.
Race pace scatters more, but the two lenses split the same way. In seconds the low is the Canada sprint at 2.26s; normalized, the season-best is Belgium's Grand Prix at 2.87% — 3.12s that barely registers against Spa's long lap. Seven days later Hungary sent it the other way: 3.62s and 4.38%, the third-worst race of the year. That figure carries a fuel correction, because both Cadillacs retired — Bottas on lap 13, Pérez on lap 48 of 70 — so the field kept circulating for another 22 laps on ever-lighter fuel, and its best lap fell 2.8 seconds between the opening laps and lap 58. We therefore apply the same fair-window rule used at Austria and cap the field to the laps Cadillac actually ran. Two further caveats stand — Pérez started from the pit lane after a gearbox change, and both cars were nursing the brake-cooling failure that ended their race — so the cleanest Hungarian signal is the qualifying lap, which needs no fuel correction at all. At 4.77% it is the season's second-worst. Monaco's 3.41s looks mid-pack in seconds but is 4.6% once its slow 73-second lap is accounted for. Silverstone's race stays elevated on both lenses (3.74s / 4.1%), so that was a genuinely tough weekend, not a track artifact — matching the downforce read that its fast corners hurt the car. The Austria point (red) is the fair-window figure; without the cap it would read a misleading 4.07s, because Cadillac's best came on lap 3 with a full fuel load while the leaders set their times near the flag. Belgium isn't capped — Pérez retired on lap 13 with a rear-suspension failure, but Bottas ran the full distance, so his lap sets a fair mark.
So — is Cadillac closing the gap? Last time out we said Belgium's season-best percentages were a hint rather than a turn, and named Hungary as the test: a short, twisty lap that has flattered no one all year. Hungary answered, and the answer was no. In qualifying — the measure that needs no fuel correction — the deficit went from the season's best (3.32% at Spa) to its second-worst (4.77% at the Hungaroring) in the space of one week. The race lenses agree once fuel is accounted for: 2.87% at Spa against 4.38% in Hungary. Either way it is the clearest demonstration yet that Belgium was a long-lap artifact, not progress. In raw seconds the season still reads like improvement, from roughly four seconds down to the high-2s. But almost all of that came off a ragged Australian opener and a mid-season run of shorter circuits; as a share of the lap the gap has simply oscillated in a 3.3–4.8% band since China with no downward slope at all. The honest read stands, and hardens: one big early step, then a plateau. Cadillac has stopped losing ground; it has not started reeling the front in. The signal to watch is unchanged — when the percentages trend down across a run of different circuit types, the gap is genuinely closing. For the complementary view — the same deficit measured as cornering grip, corner by corner — see the downforce analysis.