How worried Bottas should really be about his F1 future

Valtteri Bottas has unexpectedly found himself under scrutiny for an unconvincing start at Formula 1's newest team alongside Sergio Perez, even though his Cadillac seat is not immediately at risk.

Changing driver line-up is very far down the to-do list for Cadillac and there is no real chance of Bottas being dropped during this season or, barring a major change in circumstances, for 2027.

That did not stop a huge amount of online speculation developing in the wake of a Canada weekend where Bottas was clearly second-best to Perez. Some individual opinion shared during Sky Sports Italy's coverage was twisted into a factual declaration that Cadillac could imminently replace Bottas.

The swirl of noise around this completely overlooked the fact that there is no obvious, immediate upgrade available even if Bottas had somehow shown Cadillac in just five weekends that he should be dumped. Colton Herta is not (yet) eligible for a superlicence and reserve Zhou Guanyu is hardly a guaranteed improvement.

However, Bottas is probably on slightly thinner ice than he would have liked to be at the start of the season, and the situation in Canada did him no favours.

Perez was clearly the faster Cadillac driver there, building on a Miami weekend in which he had been quicker again. This was despite Bottas using a different chassis that he was “definitely feeling better” in compared to previous races.

Bottas had been adamant in Montreal that something fundamentally was not right with the old one, and he put it down to part of the learning curve for a new team. It's a reasonable caveat as the operational problems, performance inconsistencies, and reliability issues have made clean weekends difficult for Cadillac across both sides of the garage, so Bottas's various issues so far have hardly been entirely of his making.

But there has also been a degree of Bottas not doing as well with the machinery he does have as Perez at his best. In Canada, Bottas chased the set-up all weekend. The sprint became a test with an extreme set-up direction. In qualifying, he messed up his final Q1 run which meant he ended up eight tenths of a second adrift of Perez for the second time in two days, although the sprint qualifying deficit was exaggerated by a badly timed red flag ending a better Bottas lap early.

The race was no better. Bottas said the car was over-rotating and oversteering throughout and they couldn't cure it even with a fully locked diff, so was consigned to a lonely race while Perez was in the thick of it racing other midfield cars beyond Aston Martins for the first time this season.

Across the five race weekends so far, though, a trend has emerged. Five times out of seven where a comparison is possible, Perez has been quicker in qualifying - one exception was China, where Perez had a badly compromised session and deployment issues, the other was Miami where wrong deployment spoiled his final lap.

It's not a whitewash, but when things have been clean for Cadillac, Perez has the higher peak. He's running better in races, doing a better job in qualifying in general, and is more often the faster of the two.

The on-track picture is only part of it, because nobody outside the team really knows what contribution is being made behind closed doors or what the team is asking of the drivers. But equally that off-track value will diminish over time and at some point Cadillac will not need two drivers of the same vintage. That's not going to be the case after Monaco next weekend, but what if Cadillac builds on a promising start performance-wise throughout this year and Perez properly turns out to be its North Star?

Both drivers came to Cadillac in similar positions: experienced, having spent 2025 on the sidelines, convinced they weren't done with F1. Each had something clear to offer in terms of knowing what a title-winning operation looks like. The question was always what level of on-track ability they would then bring.

With Bottas, the assumption coming in was that even at the tail end of his Sauber stint he'd retained that qualifying turn of pace, the thing that always gave him something a little extra, even if racecraft was never his strong suit.

With Perez it was kind of the opposite: the one-lap pace was a major question mark after a particularly difficult final year at Red Bull, but it was always his racecraft that set him apart, making him first one of the most formidable midfield operators and ultimately a multiple race winner.

So far, the move is working out considerably better for Perez in terms of reputation. He came to this project extremely hungry, wanting to prove not just to the wider world but to himself that he could still hack it, and wanting to achieve something meaningful rather than simply being a safe pair of hands while Cadillac finds its feet.

You saw that from the very first race weekend: the novelty of making it to the finish in Cadillac's debut grand prix wore off within seconds of the chequered flag, when Perez was already demanding improvements over the radio. He's also been pushing hard in meetings, lighting a fire under the team, flagging areas he feels need urgent attention.

Bottas is a naturally quieter character, and there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to be perpetually intense to be a driving force within a team. And clearly he wants to be an F1 driver more than he wants to drive somewhere else.

But Perez has looked and sounded like he needs to be one since getting the Cadillac seat confirmed last year.

It's a small but potentially significant difference in how they might be wired into this project. The motivation doesn't need to be dramatically different to produce a tangible difference in output.

By now, Cadillac will have extracted a lot of the low-hanging fruit from two experienced drivers during the start-up phase. The question of what can actually drive the team forward, and whether either or both drivers can be part of that longer term, becomes more pressing from here.

Cadillac won't want two experienced veterans indefinitely but one of them might have a place beyond the team's first couple of years.

On current evidence, as limited as the sample set is so far, you'd take Perez. That is the real threat to Bottas's F1 future - much further down the line than recent speculation would suggest, but real nonetheless.