The Inheritance of Checo Pérez: Building Cadillac From Year One

Sergio “Checo” Pérez left Guadalajara for Germany at 15 to race Formula BMW—a teenager on his own in a country whose language he was still learning. He took his first Formula 1 win at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix even though a first-lap collision dropped him to last. Five more victories came at Red Bull Racing, along with second place in the 2023 world championship behind Max Verstappen. At the end of 2024, he and Red Bull agreed to part ways, and he spent 2025 away from racing, a year he has said renewed his love for the sport.

In August 2025, Cadillac signed him to race alongside Valtteri Bottas in its debut season, giving the sport’s eleventh team two of its most experienced drivers. Pérez has called it his final big project in Formula 1. “Honestly, I’m very happy to be part of this,” he tells Surface in Austin, where the team spent the weekend at the United States Grand Prix. “For me, it’s very special to have this kind of opportunity.”

Cadillac took years to get here. A 2023 bid from Andretti Global and General Motors won FIA approval and stalled with Formula 1’s commercial rights holder. TWG Motorsports, led by Dan Towriss, took over the effort, and final approval came in March 2025, along with a reported $450 million entry fee. It made Cadillac the first new constructor on the grid since Haas in 2016. The car carries the history in its name: MAC-26 stands for Mario Andretti Cadillac, a tribute to the 1978 world champion.

The team was assembled almost from zero in under two years. By the end of 2025 it had hired 520 people from more than 143,000 applications, spread across a race base at Silverstone, a wind tunnel leased from Toyota in Cologne, and a $200 million headquarters rising in Fishers, Indiana. An engine shop near Charlotte is building the General Motors power unit due in 2029, and Ferrari supplies the engines in the meantime. Pérez turned the program’s first laps at Imola in November 2025, in an unmarked 2023 Ferrari. The real car’s livery debuted in a Super Bowl commercial in February, the MAC-26 rolled into Times Square, and the team raced for the first time in Melbourne on March 8.

Points have been harder to find. Cadillac came to Austin as the only team still waiting on its first. Overheating brakes cost both cars races through the summer, Bottas’s 13th in China remains the team’s best finish, and a tenth place for Pérez in Monaco that would have delivered a point was later lost. In August, ownership replaced team principal Graeme Lowdon with Marcin Budkowski, a former Alpine executive director, and said the team was moving out of its build phase and into a push for performance. Pérez pushes back on anyone who reads the year as a decline, and earlier this month called 2026 “without a doubt one of my best years.”

Monaco was also where Cadillac rolled out its motorhome, a three-story paddock building finished in 13 months, with a rooftop terrace and a ground floor where the whole team eats together. Team manager Peter Crolla calls culture “a massive thing” for him. “The commitment it has,” Pérez says of the team. “They’re always looking to improve, and the ‘whatever it takes’ mentality is incredible.”

Pérez has driven for five teams across fourteen seasons. Sauber gave him his start in 2011, and McLaren handed him a front-running seat for a single year at 23. Force India is where he carried a small team onto the podium, and at Red Bull he backed a four-time world champion and helped win two constructors’ titles. Cadillac makes him the senior figure in the building for the first time. “All my experience over all these years has been very important, crucial,” he says, “for me to grow into the lead driver of this team.” He has also said his voice carries real weight inside the team, and that he feels the responsibility that comes with it.

Austin was Cadillac’s second American race of the year after Miami. The cars wore a one-off livery drawn from Western wear, with chain stitching off vintage cowboy shirts, saddlery scrollwork on the sidepods, and race numbers lettered like a rodeo poster. Pérez and Bottas wore matching race suits. On Friday night the team opened the Ranch House, a sold-out evening of live music, Texas food, and Austin-made keepsakes for fans. Pérez has raced at Circuit of the Americas for more than a decade. “Honestly, it’s incredible,” he says of this year. “There’s a great atmosphere and excellent support from the whole team.”

He qualified 21st on Saturday and finished 19th on Sunday, a lap down on winner Kimi Antonelli and the last car still running after Bottas stopped with a late failure. The Mexico City Grand Prix on November 1 brings him home, to the crowd that has followed him since his karting days in Jalisco.

Between race weekends, his focus is his family. He and his wife, Carola Martínez, have four children. “My family in general, my children,” he says. “In the end, I’m doing this last stage of my career to give my kids a great example, in sport and in life. For me, that’s fundamental.”