Three Bases, One Team: Cadillac F1 and the Organisational Puzzle Facing Pérez and Bottas

Montreal, the ninth round of the season. When the chequered flag waved, both Cadillacs were already in the garage. Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas walked out with expressionless faces – a sight I have seen in many sports teams before they start blaming each other. From Montreal onward, the picture only darkened. In the next ten rounds, Cadillac failed to finish with both cars eight times. A team with two race-winning drivers managed just two double finishes after that point. Cadillac F1 is the newest team in Formula 1, owned by TWG Motorsport, an American automotive group. From day one, they declared their goal was to fight for the world championship. That was not empty talk when they recruited Pérez, a multiple Grand Prix winner with Red Bull, and Bottas, Lewis Hamilton's former teammate at Mercedes. Yet after thirteen rounds of the 2026 season, Cadillac sit last in the Constructors' Championship. The decline is not caused by a single poor race; it comes from an operating structure now under fierce criticism. The critic is not a journalist. Otmar Szafnauer, former Alpine team principal, appeared on the High Performance Racing podcast and delivered a sharp diagnosis: the three-base organisational model is Cadillac's ceiling. Silverstone handles car design, Indianapolis handles aerodynamics, South Carolina operates the simulator. Three locations, three time zones, three engineering cultures. Szafnauer posed a hypothetical: if you put McLaren, Mercedes or Red Bull into that same structure, would they win? His answer: no. What gives weight to his warning is that it rests on a concrete mechanism, not a vague remark. In modern Formula 1, every upgrade package is a closed loop: simulation engineers test on computers, then wind tunnel, then track. When the three stages sit in three different places, data must travel through three storage systems, three processes and three video calls in three time zones. The error is not in any specific person; it lives in the silence between bases – the silence I learned to listen to during empty stadiums in 2026. Moscow taught me that preparation begins with calling people by their correct names; here, the name of the problem is organisational structure. The result is what engineers call correlation failure. A part runs beautifully in simulation, but when fitted to the real car it does not deliver the expected gain. The team loses time, money and internal belief. None of the top teams on the grid operates in this fragmented way. McLaren, Red Bull and Mercedes concentrate their key departments in one place, around the UK motorsport cluster. That lets an aero engineer and a simulation engineer meet in the canteen, talk over coffee, and fix a design before it becomes a problem. The data from this season reveals an interesting paradox. In the first three rounds, both Cadillacs finished – something even Red Bull and McLaren could not claim. That shows the team has a basic reliability foundation. But after Montreal, everything fell out of rhythm. If two experienced drivers like Pérez and Bottas keep failing to finish, it is very hard to blame the drivers. Probability shifts toward the system. When a team in its foundation phase chooses to work in a fragmented way, slowness is not an accident; it is an inevitable consequence. In football, I have seen clubs do the same thing: recruit analysis staff in one city, scouting staff in another, build a training centre in a third. The results tend to be identical. Nobody makes one obviously wrong decision, but the message passing between departments fades; by the time people notice, it is too late. Cadillac is repeating that loop. Putting aerodynamics in Indianapolis may have been commercially sound, but if it is not connected to the technical feedback loop, what is sound on paper becomes a mistake on track. One detail struck me especially. Indianapolis is still under construction. That means Cadillac is being judged on a model they have not even completed. In sport, there is a cruel rule: people do not wait for you to finish building before scoring you. Yet looking at the history of new teams entering top-level series, most experience a lost period in their first two seasons. Cadillac is no exception. What worries me is not the last place, but the apparent absence of any central technical authority to reconcile three bases. When no one has the final say between an aero engineer in America and a simulation engineer in England, every upgrade becomes a long argument. Every week of delay is a week lost on track. However, I want to ask the opposite question. Is the three-base model really just a technical mistake, or does it serve another objective that experts tend to miss? TWG Motorsport is an American corporation. Indianapolis and South Carolina are on American soil. If the team's goal is to define an American identity – attracting American sponsors, American media, American sympathy – then having bases in America could be a commercial investment, not a performance one. Szafnauer may be right on purely technical grounds, but he may be ignoring why the leadership chose this arrangement. Moreover, Szafnauer is a former director of a rival team. His opinion carries weight but is not neutral. When a veteran writer looks at such a debate, he learns to separate a grounded diagnosis from a message with intent. Criticising a structure while it is still incomplete is different from criticising one that is fully operational. And if the team truly sees the three-base model as a tool to conquer the American market, then this technical debate has to be weighed against commercial strategy. If I could sit with Cadillac's leadership, I would ask one question: are you building a championship-winning team, or an American symbol? Neither answer is wrong. But if you choose both, you will get both failures – a team that does not win, and a symbol that is not whole. I have lived through generations of sport and watched the most talented groups fall apart simply because they would not decide who they were. Cadillac is luckier than many teams I have followed: they have money, drivers and time. What they lack is a decisive choice. The beat keeper does not run the fastest; he runs the full distance. Cadillac needs to stop running circles among three time zones and start running in one direction.