Bottas forced to lift and coast on lap two as Cadillac's brake woes persist in Singapore

Valtteri Bottas was forced into brake management as early as lap two of the Singapore Grand Prix at Marina Bay, underlining that Cadillac’s persistent overheating problem has not yet been fully resolved despite a series of upgrades to the MAC-26 this season.

“I had to start increasing lift-and-coast on lap two,” Bottas revealed after the race. “Eventually things stabilised and I didn’t need to do any lift-and-coast for a while, then it came back.”

Brake overheating has been one of the defining technical headaches of Cadillac’s debut Formula 1 campaign, contributing to four retirements across the season. The team introduced targeted upgrades in Hungary and again in Azerbaijan, with the Baku package alone reducing brake temperatures by 100 degrees Celsius according to Bottas. Singapore, however, demonstrated that the fix remains incomplete.

When pressed on whether the race had served as a meaningful test of those upgrades, Bottas was measured. “We finished with both cars. It required management, but I would imagine most teams will need to do some kind of management here. I think the problem is almost solved. We should be good for the rest of the year, and obviously next year’s design should be quite a bit different.”

The brake issue alone does not account for the scale of Bottas’s deficit on Sunday. The Finn finished 96 seconds behind team-mate Sergio Perez — a gap that equates to roughly 1.6 seconds per lap — and came close to being lapped. Bottas struggled to pinpoint the root cause.

“No pace at all in the first stint, like, talking about a second a lap,” he said. “Pretty much the same story all through the race. I was trying everything I could. If I’m lacking pace on the entry or mid-corner then I can do that, but then I lose in the exit or some other phase of the corner. The only thing I can say is the ride was really poor today, like a step change from something. So, we’ll have a look.”

Perez, meanwhile, finished 48 seconds behind Fernando Alonso but offered a more positive assessment of the car’s underlying performance. “We were very strong with the pace that we had today,” the Mexican said. “We were very solid out there.”

Bottas is not expecting an immediate turnaround heading into the United States Grand Prix. “We know it’s going to be another difficult one, but hopefully better than here,” he said. “It somehow feels like we underperformed here a bit, like, we were way off the pace in the race.”