That Baku grand prix was a disaster for Valtteri Bottas, and as The Race reports, the Cadillac driver has finally shed some light on just how slow his machine really was. Bottas sat on average over a whopping 1.7 seconds slower per lap than team-mate Sergio Perez at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, marking the largest intra-team deficit of the 2026 season so far. Even his single fastest lap lagged 1.489 seconds behind Perez.
Things only ended one way for that sort of misery. Bottas found the wall on the final lap after his deployment pattern went haywire following an excursion down the Turn 1 escape road. That extra distance killed his rear brakes by the time he reached the Turn 15 left-hander, sliding him right into the barriers. Long before that, Perez was comfortably closing in on lapping him.
Bottas admitted the reality of the situation was grim. "I understand it looked pretty bad from the outside and felt pretty bad in the car as well," he said on Thursday in Malaysia, adding that keeping up with the pack was simply impossible despite throwing everything at it.
Trouble was baked into the weekend from the start. Practice sessions exposed a massive lack of pace, prompting the team to overhaul the dampers and floor ahead of qualifying. While that initially improved the feel, the ride degraded heavily during the race. Bottas pointed to dampers degrading with heat, floor issues, and missing pressure tappings that left them blind on aero parts compared to what he was used to in the past. Combine that with a power steering system that degraded all weekend, and he was left completely blind to what the car was doing.
Then there is the mechanical elephant in the room: the power unit. Perez ran the upgraded ADUO 2 Ferrari engine in Baku, a specification Bottas has yet to receive. While initially billed as a small difference, Bottas concedes the reality in the data is bigger than anticipated. It is currently a "50/50" shot whether his ADUO 2 arrives in time for Sepang, otherwise forcing him to wait until Singapore. Perez, meanwhile, will swap to a different power unit from his pool this weekend to save the ADUO 2 for a track where it counts more.
Cadillac expects more pain this weekend in Sepang. The team faces massive struggles with tyre overheating and high-speed corners, plagued by what Perez describes as "a massive lack of load in the car and a lot of drag." Perez noted that in Baku he spent the entire race in overtake mode just to stay with the others, only to find himself a passenger lacking straightline speed during overtakes. It is a brutal baptism of fire for the new outfit, but as Perez points out, nobody expected a trouble-free debut year.
