The Formula 1 team that will soon call Fishers home hit another rough patch Sunday, as both Cadillac cars failed to finish the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest.
Valtteri Bottas was the first to go. On Lap 15 of the 70-lap race, the Finn pulled into the pit lane with his left-front brake on fire, even using the pit wall to help slow the car, according to PlanetF1’s race report. Teammate Sergio Perez, who had started from the pit lane, limped back to the garage late in the race and joined Bottas in retirement. Both drivers are officially classified as DNF (Did Not Finish) in the official results, where Lando Norris took the win for McLaren.
The double retirement extends a frustrating pattern for the first-year American team. Just four weeks ago in Austria, both Cadillacs dropped out within the opening laps with brake fires — Bottas’ third straight retirement after brake-related exits in Monaco and Barcelona, RacingNews365 reported. After that race, Bottas said the team should accept an aerodynamic penalty in exchange for bigger brake cooling. “We’ve got to start finishing races; that’s when we learn,” he said.
Why does any of this matter in Hamilton County? Because the team’s growing pains are, in a real sense, ours. Cadillac’s world Formula 1 headquarters — a $200 million, 400,000-square-foot facility — is rising right now between 96th and 106th streets west of Hague Road, near Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport. The Fishers campus is expected to employ about 300 engineers, technicians and staff who will design and build the team’s race cars.
For now, Cadillac is running its debut season out of a temporary base in Silverstone, England, while construction here is completed. That means the solutions to problems like Sunday’s brake fires will eventually be engineered a short drive from downtown Fishers.
New F1 teams almost always struggle in year one, and reliability — not speed — has been Cadillac’s biggest hurdle. The next chance to turn things around comes Aug. 23 at the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort. By the time the team’s operations move to Fishers, locals will hope the hard lessons of 2026 have already been learned.