While crews keep pouring concrete on the team’s future home off 96th Street, Cadillac’s Formula 1 dream came within five seconds of its first-ever championship point Sunday in the streets of Monte Carlo — only to have it taken away after the checkered flag.
It was a heartbreaker with local roots. The Cadillac Formula 1 Team, whose $200 million global headquarters is rising right now next to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport in Fishers, looked set to celebrate a milestone when veteran Sergio Pérez crossed the line 10th in a chaotic, red-flag-interrupted Monaco Grand Prix. Tenth place pays one point — the first in team history.
It didn’t last. Stewards penalized Pérez 10 seconds for lining up out of position at the race’s final restart, dropping the Mexican from 10th to 15th and erasing the point. The single marker instead went to Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin. For a brand-new outfit clawing for every result, it was a cruel way to end an otherwise encouraging weekend.
The day belonged to teenager Kimi Antonelli, who survived a wild race to take victory ahead of Lewis Hamilton. Monaco favorite Charles Leclerc crashed out on a safety-car restart in front of his home crowd, one of several shock retirements that scrambled the order and briefly opened the door for Cadillac.
For Hamilton County race fans, the storyline is bigger than one disputed point. Cadillac — General Motors’ factory entry and the 11th team on the F1 grid — has made Fishers the heart of its operation. The 400,000-square-foot campus, designed by Indianapolis-based Ratio Architects and built by Clark Construction, is slated for completion this year and expected to employ roughly 300 engineers, technicians and staff. Eventually, the bulk of the team’s race cars will be designed and built here in central Indiana.
For now, the team runs its 2026 car out of a temporary base in Silverstone, England, while the Fishers facility is finished. But the long-term vision is unmistakable: an American Formula 1 team, with American manufacturing muscle, headquartered minutes from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It was a tougher Sunday on the other side of the garage. Veteran Valtteri Bottas, who lined up 20th, never got a clean run at it. Front-brake trouble had dogged the team all weekend, and despite managing the temperatures from the opening lap, the crew couldn’t keep them in check. Bottas was forced to pit and retire — a DNF that capped a frustrating weekend made noisier by swirling rumors about his future, which the Finn flatly dismissed.
The driver lineup still brings instant credibility. Pérez and Bottas arrived with 16 Grand Prix wins and more than 500 starts between them — exactly the kind of experience a debut team needs while it finds its feet. Sunday showed both the promise and the growing pains: fast enough to fight for points, new enough to get caught out by the sport’s unforgiving rulebook and its own teething mechanical gremlins.
The point will come. With a state-of-the-art headquarters taking shape just up the road and a season still unfolding, Cadillac’s first taste of F1 glory feels like a matter of when, not if — and when it happens, Fishers will have a genuine claim to a piece of it.