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Valtteri Bottas has urged Cadillac to prioritise brake cooling over aerodynamic efficiency after both he and Sergio Perez were eliminated in the opening laps of the Austrian Grand Prix by brake fires.
The failure marked Bottas’s third consecutive retirement, deepening a reliability pattern that has now become impossible for the team to treat as an isolated issue. He had already retired in Monaco due to brake concerns, before overheating ended his Barcelona race. Perez has also encountered brake overheating trouble, with an issue appearing during practice in Monaco.
For Bottas, Austria represented the lowest point of Cadillac’s season so far. The Finn described the weekend as the most disappointing of the campaign, not simply because of the result, but because both cars were out almost immediately and the team was denied valuable race mileage.
As Cadillac continues to build its Formula 1 operation, technical robustness is becoming as important as outright performance. That context also makes wider team development significant, including the reported incoming technical reinforcement covered in our piece on Paul Monaghan’s expected Cadillac move.
Bottas said the team had seen no clear sign in practice that the brakes were on the edge. According to him, Cadillac had completed runs long enough to reveal peak brake temperatures, only for race conditions to expose a more severe weakness.
“There was no warning, like everything was under control in practice, we did more than 10 laps in a row, and that is normally more than enough to get peak temperatures for the beginning of the race,” Bottas explained to media, including RacingNews365.
He pointed to the combination of slightly higher temperatures and the effect of running in traffic as the trigger for the fire.
“But with the slight increase in temperatures, and then with the traffic effect, things just caught on fire, and it is a big issue. It was really sudden, like I only got the smoke before Turn 4, and then out of Turn 4, I saw the fire, and it was really rapid.”
Bottas was clear about the trade-off he believes Cadillac must make. Bigger brake cooling vents may carry an aerodynamic cost, but he argued that finishing races has to come first.
“It is clear that we’ve got to re-design some bits; otherwise, we’re not going to finish races,” he said. “But there will be an aerodynamic cost to using a bigger brake, but I’ll take that penalty to finish a race. We’ve got to start finishing races; that’s when we learn.”
His assessment cuts to the heart of Cadillac’s immediate problem: performance cannot be developed properly if race distance remains out of reach.
“It was probably the most disappointing race of the season, both cars out only a few laps in, so the only thing we can do is work hard, and that’s going to be the only solution to move forward.”
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.