Why Cadillac is chasing downforce while the rest of the field obsess over Power Units

For most Formula 1 teams, qualifying more than four seconds off pole at a season opener would be a source of embarrassment. For Cadillac, it marked something else entirely: proof that a team built from scratch, with its entry only guaranteed 12 months ago, had made it to the grid at all.

The immediate question, however, is far more pressing: how to survive — and progress — in what is expected to be a brutally fast development race under a radically different set of technical regulations.

A different diagnosis to the rest of the grid

What makes Cadillac’s situation particularly intriguing is how its drivers frame the team’s performance limitations. While much of the grid is consumed by extracting maximum efficiency from the power unit, Cadillac sees its deficit elsewhere.

"I think Ferrari proved that they can race towards the front end, so the power unit is decent," said Valtteri Bottas ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix weekend. "And we should get all the help from them as well. We can see which kind of deployment they are using and we can easily just do the same if we want.

"So I don't see the deployment as the limitation. It's definitely our car. Especially on the aero side, we're lacking quite a lot of load, especially on the rear end of the car, which now has kind of boxed us in with this mechanical setup a little bit, because we just need to do everything we can to protect the rear end."

That stance stands in contrast to the wider paddock narrative. With the exception of Aston Martin — which is facing its own unique issues — most teams are prioritising power unit optimisation above traditional set-up gains. Mercedes’ customers, in particular, have been watching the factory squad closely.

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri offered a revealing perspective: "We've probably not even spoken about the car that much. Because we're so focused on how to get the most out of the power unit. I think one of the things we learned was the kind of difference you can make by optimising the power unit is an order of magnitude bigger than anything you can do with the setup of the car.

"In car set-up, there's maybe a tenth or two, if you really turn things around. But I think it's just understanding what you need from the car to get the most out of the power unit.

"That's the biggest thing, but especially at the moment, so much of our time and capacity is taken up by finding those big gains from the power unit that anything we do with the car, unless it's undriveable, we'll deal with that later."

The reality of a rushed programme

There are important caveats. McLaren’s MCL40 is a far more aerodynamically sophisticated package than Cadillac’s MAC-26 — an inevitable consequence of Cadillac’s compressed preparation timeline.

The visual contrast is stark, even when comparing it with Aston Martin’s troubled AMR26 nearby. One seasoned paddock observer unkindly likened the MAC-26 to "a show car you might see in a shopping mall, or the airport" — exaggeration perhaps, but reflective of how raw the package appears relative to its peers.

Bottas himself acknowledged before the Australian Grand Prix that many elements of the launch specification had to be signed off early simply to guarantee production in time. Pushing deadlines is a luxury for teams with deeper in-house manufacturing experience — and even that has proven risky this year, as Williams and Aston Martin have shown.

Why aero, balance and energy are now interlinked

It would be simplistic to treat aerodynamics, mechanical set-up and power unit management as isolated performance pillars. Under the 2026 regulations, they are intertwined more tightly than ever.

Cornering speed directly affects how much energy a car can harvest and how effectively it can deploy it. The intrigue around Mercedes’ factory advantage in Melbourne illustrates the point.

Mercedes demonstrated a distinct harvesting approach built around different gear ratios and a greater proportion of super clipping relative to lift-and-coast. Crucially, the super clipping was executed while still in straight-line mode — with active aerodynamics minimising drag — to mitigate the top-speed penalty. That required a longer braking phase, placing heavy demands on chassis stability and aerodynamic efficiency. Carry too much speed into the corner and understeer erodes momentum.

In that context, much of the frustration from Mercedes’ customer teams over a perceived knowledge gap effectively boils down to a simple question: why did we not think of that?

Cadillac’s compounding problem

For Cadillac, the shortage of rear downforce is not an isolated weakness — it cascades through the entire lap.

When Bottas speaks of being "boxed in" on set-up, he refers to the need to dial in understeer to protect a relatively weak rear end and preserve balance. The result is increased sliding, higher tyre degradation and slower apex speeds.

That loss of apex speed carries a double penalty: it costs lap time directly and reduces the amount of energy harvested through the corner, compromising performance further along the lap.

Shanghai compounds the issue. As a front-limited circuit with fast, variable-radius corners that heavily load the front-left tyre, understeer brings an additional performance cost.

The Iimmediate priority

The short-term objective is therefore clear. Cadillac must generate efficient rear downforce to move into a performance window where it can properly exploit its Ferrari power unit.

Only once that foundation is established can it begin to interrogate finer details — including the quality and flow of information from its supplier, should it deem that a productive use of management energy.

For now, while much of Formula 1 chases marginal gains in deployment strategy and harvesting maps, Cadillac’s battle is more fundamental. Before it can optimise energy, it must first build the aerodynamic platform that allows it to carry speed — and harvest it — in the first place.