Graham Loudon: Someone else's experience won't help us

      Sergio Perez finished 16th in the recent Chinese Grand Prix, being the last among those who completed the race in the second round of the season. The Mexican Cadillac F1 driver lost more than a lap to the race winner, and the average speed of his car was over six km/h slower than that of Kimi Antonelli's Mercedes. After this, Sergio characterized the position of the new American team at the start of its debut season with the phrase: "The honeymoon is over." However, it could have been worse, as both Cadillac cars managed to finish in Shanghai. Moreover, the team is gradually progressing: according to calculations by The Race, if in Australia the qualifying pace of the American team's cars was 5.2% worse than that of Mercedes, in China this gap narrowed to 4.7%. Notably, Valtteri Bottas managed to overtake Lance Stroll, the Aston Martin driver, at that time.

      Of course, the Cadillac team constantly faces various difficulties, the list of which is virtually endless – largely because the new team is just beginning to accumulate track experience. "We have to be realistic and acknowledge how hard all of this is," said team principal Graham Loudon in an interview with The Race. "But we are already adjusting our goals, and the task is no longer just to finish races, but to compete with other teams, and that is very encouraging. Moreover, all of this is happening earlier than I expected.

      Any new team has to learn many lessons, including painful ones, but all teams in the championship have gone through this, and now we are testing all our systems and procedures for stress resistance. There is no way to speed up this process. The experience of other teams won't help here; we have to go through all of this ourselves. But since we are successfully handling all our priority tasks, from initial testing to race distance completion, it indicates that we have managed to create a truly solid foundation, and the work on building the team continues.

      Now we are shifting our focus to the next tasks, but all of this requires colossal effort... In Melbourne, we celebrated our first birthday (a year since the team's participation in the World Championship was officially confirmed). We are growing in front of everyone's eyes, and there are high expectations of us.

      We always say that every day is dedicated to learning, and if we fail to learn something new, it means we are doing something wrong. In general, we continue to learn, put in maximum effort, and keep building the team.

      At the Miami event, we will present several technical innovations. I don't have detailed information yet, as changes in the season calendar will also affect our approach to car upgrades. I have no doubt that the same is happening in other teams in the championship... Additional time will help us, and it is very important to use the April break as effectively as possible, but we do not intend to take a break and will continue to work at the same pace."

      Returning to Perez's phrase about the honeymoon, it should be noted that the first phase of the Cadillac project has indeed been successfully completed, but at the next stage, the new team will have to solve a huge number of tasks of varying complexity, most of which traditional participants in the World Championship have long since resolved, but it took them many years. Even Haas has been competing in Formula 1 for the 11th season now.