Why has Valtteri Bottas lost his F1 race pace? The 'million-dollar question'

Valtteri Bottas crossed the finish line at the Singapore Grand Prix within sight of Sergio Perez, who came close to lapping his Cadillac Formula 1 team-mate. It was another stark indication of the growing gap between the pair, which is increasingly difficult to ignore.

Their qualifying record during the 2026 season suggests a relatively close contest but the race results are starting to tell a rather different story, one that Bottas himself is struggling to explain.

“That’s the million dollar question,” he said after the Singapore race when asked where his pace had gone.

Cadillac has spent much of its debut Formula 1 season bringing up the rear, with its lack of performance rarely attracting attention beyond the battle at the back of the field.

That has made the contest between its two veteran drivers all the more revealing, because it is one of the few reliable performance benchmarks either of the experienced grand prix winners has.

After 17 grand prix weekends, Perez leads the qualifying head-to-head by just nine sessions to eight (13-9 with sprints). In a season in which both drivers have frequently been fighting at the back of the grid, that suggests neither has established a consistent advantage over a single lap.

The race record is considerably less balanced, though.

Perez has finished ahead of Bottas in 11 grands prix, against four for the Finn, with no comparison awarded in Austria and Hungary, where both drivers retired.

That 11–4 split sounds alarming in itself, but it also needs context.

Cadillac has suffered plenty of reliability problems throughout its first season, with Bottas retiring from seven grands prix compared with five for Perez, although not all of them have been caused by car problems.

Obviously not every defeat equals a difference in pace, and a mechanical failure cannot reasonably be held against a driver as evidence that he is slower.

Even allowing for that, however, the contrast between the two head-to-head records raises a question. If Bottas can match Perez often enough in qualifying, why has he so rarely been able to finish ahead of him on Sundays?

The answer may not be straightforward, as Bottas himself admitted, but the size of the difference deserves closer examination.

A difficult run of races

The recent results provide some of the clearest examples of the contrast between the two Cadillac drivers.

At Monza, Bottas actually outqualified Perez by 0.231 seconds. Neither driver had a particularly competitive race, but Perez finished two laps down in 18th, one place ahead of his team-mate, who crossed the finish line three laps down.

The following round in Azerbaijan produced a much more dramatic qualifying difference, and a shocking result in the race.

Perez was 1.632 seconds faster than Bottas in qualifying, although a yellow flag affected the Finn’s lap and makes the margin an imperfect measure of their relative pace.

In the race, however, Bottas was, on average, over 1.6 seconds per lap slower before he crashed out due to a deployment issue. The Finn’s fastest lap was 1.5sec slower than Perez, although it’s worth noting the Mexican had the latest, ADUO2 Ferrari power unit while Bottas didn’t have access to it.

There was another reversal in qualifying at the following round in Sepang, where Bottas was 0.322 seconds quicker, yet he spun out after seven laps, leaving Perez to finish 19th.

Singapore brought the focus back onto the performance gap. Perez qualified 20th, with Bottas 0.861 seconds off the Mexican’s pace.

Perez finished 17th, two laps down on the winner, with Bottas 19th, three laps down.

The classification doesn’t tell us much about the gap given Cadillac is essentially unable to fight with other team, but it was another weekend in which Perez emerged with a much better overall result, as Bottas again lapped some 1.5sec slower on average than his team-mate, who nearly lapped him.

Bottas has demonstrated that he can be faster over a single lap, while his race results have frequently failed to reflect that competitiveness.

At other weekends, such as Baku and Singapore, the qualifying gap itself has been substantial.

The important question is whether those larger deficits are isolated incidents or evidence of a more persistent problem.

“The pace isn’t coming”

Bottas’s comments after Singapore suggested that he was still searching for an explanation. Asked what had happened to his pace during the first stint, he replied: “That’s the million dollar question. I couldn’t find the pace. I don’t know, honestly.”

He acknowledged that lifting and coasting to manage Cadillac’s tricky brakes had contributed to the problem early in the race, but was clear that it did not explain everything.

“Throughout, just a big lack of pace,” he said. “The only thing I could say for now would be the car felt really poor.”

Bottas insisted that he was giving everything he could to find an improvement, but that the results were not translating his efforts into performance. The team will investigate the problem before trying again at the next round.

Cadillac may be struggling to find a set-up that suits Bottas, the car may be behaving inconsistently, or the Finn may be having difficulty extracting the same performance from it as Perez.

Bottas’s comments have left all those possibilities open, but without any clear answers.

A problem for Cadillac to solve?

As hard as Bottas’s season has been, there are good reasons not to draw sweeping conclusions from a year spent in an uncompetitive car.

When the available performance is limited, small differences in set-up, tyre preparation or driver confidence can have a bigger effect.

A driver who struggles to get the car into its operating window can quickly find himself losing time, without necessarily having suffered a fundamental loss of ability.

That is particularly relevant at a circuit such as Singapore, where the bumps, barriers and demands of low-speed traction make confidence and car balance crucial.