Valtteri Bottas in the Cadillac MAC-26 at the 2026 Austrian Grand Prix. Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A signed contract is the cheapest object in a paddock. Teams buy them out, let them lapse, or simply stop mentioning them when the plan changes. That is the useful lens for Valtteri Bottas’s Cadillac seat, which looks safe on paper for 2027 and is being treated in practice like an open question.
What the paperwork says
Formula 1’s own driver contract tracker lists Bottas on a multi-year Cadillac deal that runs until at least the end of 2027. Sergio Pérez is also listed as multi-year, with no end date given. What Cadillac has not done is publish a 2027 line-up of its own.
The team principal had a chance to settle it. At the Friday FIA press conference in Austin, Marcin Budkowski was asked whether both drivers hold 2027 contracts and declined to go there, saying driver news comes through official team releases. We broke down how he dodged it earlier this week. A refusal to discuss a contract is not a denial of anything, but it is also not the sound a team makes when the answer is a flat yes.
What the garage says
Look at who is sitting in the cars. In Austin, Cadillac’s own practice report shows Colton Herta in Pérez’s car for FP1. In Mexico City, the team’s preview says Herta takes Bottas’s car for the first session, his fifth FP1 appearance for the team.
Rotating a reserve through both cars is normal, and it would be lazy to read a driver’s sacking into every FP1 swap. But the timing matters. Mexico City sits at 2,240 metres, where thin air hits cooling and downforce and makes the usual setup book close to useless. Giving up the one free hour to learn that on-track is a real cost for the incumbent, and it is a cost the team chose to pay with a driver who has never started a Grand Prix.
Is Bottas actually the problem?
The numbers do not make that case. In Austin FP2, Bottas was 19th on a 1:38.422, about six tenths clear of Pérez, who was 21st on a 1:39.036 after missing FP1. Both were in the back rows, and Bottas himself said the team still sees a gap to the frontrunners. Then came the race, where he slowed and pulled off late, triggering a Virtual Safety Car that barely troubled race winner Kimi Antonelli. Pérez finished, but at the back.
That is the trap of judging teammates in a car at the bottom of the order: two drivers separated by tenths, with reliability and setup experiments deciding who looks better on a given day, tells you very little about who should drive in 2027. The decision looks less like a performance referendum and more like a development one. Budkowski has said Cadillac stopped developing this year’s car and is using parts at races as experiments for next year’s, so the 2027 pick comes down to which driver’s feedback the team trusts to steer a new package. Cadillac’s mid-season change of team principal already showed it is willing to rewrite its own plans.
What to watch in Mexico City
Bottas has history at this circuit: nine starts, points in six of them, podiums in 2015, 2017 and 2019, and pole in 2021, according to Cadillac’s preview. Pérez is chasing his 300th Grand Prix start at home, which will soak up most of the attention. Watch three things: how much running Bottas gets in FP2 after losing FP1, whether he is the quicker Cadillac again, and whether Cadillac says anything about 2027 while the spotlight is elsewhere. The wider picture of who is moving where is in our 2027 driver market rundown.
If Bottas is staying, the cheapest confirmation in the sport is a one-line press release. Until Cadillac issues one, “multi-year” is a description of a contract, not a promise about a seat.
Lead image: Valtteri Bottas in the Cadillac MAC-26 at the 2026 Austrian Grand Prix. Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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