Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez both drive for Cadillac, but at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix last weekend, they might as well have been in different races. Perez delivered a stunning performance, matching the pace of the midfield, while Bottas lagged far behind and eventually crashed into the wall before the race ended.
Such a stark intra-team performance gap is rare. Bottas was outqualified by 1.632 seconds, albeit hindered by a yellow flag, and his woes continued in the race. By his first pit stop on lap 26, the Finn was already over 46 seconds adrift of his teammate, equating to a loss of 1.9 seconds per lap. After the safety car periods, he was still dropping back by around 1.6 seconds per lap.
“Long one,” Bottas nervously chuckled when asked to describe his race. “Honestly, no pace at all. I could only fight with Fernando [Alonso] – for sure, we lost some time there. Otherwise, pretty far off, so lots of things to look into from this weekend.”
The veteran admitted he had to do some lift-and-coast but reckoned that didn’t explain his mammoth deficit. “I think there's something else. We'll have a look,” he said.
Meanwhile, Perez impressed by matching the midfield pace throughout the first stint. On lap 20, when Carlos Sainz made his first pit stop, the Spaniard led the Cadillac by just one second; Audi pair Nico Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto weren’t much further down the road.
Perez made the most of the safety car to emerge ahead of Sainz and passed Bortoleto to briefly hold 12th after the restart chaos, but eventually fell back to 15th behind Liam Lawson, Bortoleto, and Oscar Piastri.
“It's been one of my best weekends in Baku to be honest, I managed to get 150% out of that car,” said the two-time Azerbaijan GP winner. “We were fighting cars that are a second or two faster than us due to the overtake mode, so we stayed with them throughout the first stint – with the Williams, with the Audi, big gap. But then in the end at the restart we just don't have any straightline speed, so we fall back. We fought for a bit with Piastri, I think he had some damage.
“At the moment we're lacking really half a second to a second to be able to mix with them. The problem is really my pace. I was a sitting duck on the straights, so I knew that there was not much opportunity.”
The gap between Perez and Bottas may therefore be explained by the Mexican’s attacking ethos in the Baku streets: “The way I felt like I was driving, if anything went wrong at any corner I would have put it in the wall. So when you do a race like this, you feel really proud.”
Meanwhile, Bottas’ race ended in the wall due to a technical issue shortly before the checkered flag. “The same lap I had a lock-up into Turn 1, I went wg” he said (statement truncated).
With this result, Perez scored valuable points while Bottas will want to forget a tough weekend. The performance gap between them is a major talking point, and Cadillac must find solutions quickly to be competitive for the rest of the season.
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