Bottas Wastes No Time: Inside His Early Work With Cadillac’s 2026 F1 Newcomer

The lights had barely cooled over Yas Marina when Valtteri Bottas changed uniforms. One night he was the familiar silver shadow in Mercedes overalls; by the next morning, as F1i reports, he was in Cadillac gear, strapped into a brand-new seat fit and “diving into preparations” for Formula 1’s newest team. For Bottas, the 2026 comeback tour has already started – long before the first winter test turns a wheel.

Cadillac, backed by General Motors and TWG Motorsports, will join the grid in 2026 as the 11th team, operating from hubs in Fishers, Indiana, Charlotte and Silverstone. Their debut driver line-up is anything but rookie: Bottas, a 10-time Grand Prix winner, and Sergio Pérez, a six-time victor, were unveiled in August as the American outfit’s spearhead, bringing what GM’s announcement calls an “unmatched blend of experience, leadership and technical acumen.” Between them they have over 500 race starts, a deliberate choice, as ESPN and The Athletic note, to prioritise known quantities under the new 2026 regulations.

The path that led Bottas to that Cadillac seat was anything but straightforward. Dropped by Sauber at the end of 2024, he spent 2025 back at Mercedes in a reserve role, a self-described “gap year” that still stung. Motorsport.com recounts the message he posted as the Abu Dhabi weekend ended: “Thank you, Mercedes… This team always has a special place in my heart… I really appreciate the opportunity to be the 3rd driver for the team.” Within hours, Mercedes had released him to start work with Cadillac – a gesture Bottas immediately seized upon.

“The sky’s the limit for the team.”

— Valtteri Bottas, speaking on F1’s official F1 Nation podcast about Cadillac’s 2026 debut

That ambition is tempered by realism about the first laps. In his F1 Nation appearance, Bottas set modest initial objectives: simply to be on the grid for the first test in January and to finish the opening race. In his first official Cadillac media duties, quoted by F1i, he talked of these early days in the factory as “the first steps to getting us ready for the first test” and stressed that “there’s a lot of hard work that lies ahead” as he plugs his experience from Williams, Mercedes and Sauber into a car being built from a blank sheet of paper.

For Cadillac’s leadership, that’s the whole point. Team principal Graeme Lowdon has called signing Bottas and Pérez a “bold signal of intent,” while CEO Dan Towriss told reporters they were the clear first choice because of their ability to create chemistry and guide development. Bottas himself framed it in GM’s launch release as joining “a long-term vision… something being built from the ground up.” The result is an alliance between an American manufacturer with global ambition and a seasoned Finn who sees his road back to the grid running through those crucial early 2026 tests.