Cadillac Still Has Zero Points. So Why Does F1 Think It's Making Progress?

Twelve rounds into their debut Formula 1 season, Cadillac have not scored a single point. Not one.

And yet after Zandvoort, both Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas walked away sounding almost upbeat.

Pérez said the pace was very strong. Bottas talked about lessons learned.

Neither of them sounded like people from a team sitting dead last in the constructors' championship with nothing to show for it.

If you only looked at the results column, you'd assume this team was having a disaster. If you listened to the drivers, you'd think they were building something.

Both things are true, and understanding why tells you more about how Formula 1 actually works than any single race result ever could.

The reality of being a new team

Cadillac joined as the sport's eleventh team this year, the first completely new entrant in a decade, and they did it during a massive regulatory overhaul that reset the entire competitive order.

New teams in F1 almost never arrive competitive. What they arrive with is data, or rather the lack of it, and an enormous amount of catching up to do against organizations that have been refining their cars for years.

Reliability, not outright pace, tends to be the first real milestone, and Cadillac has actually cleared that bar reasonably well.

Bottas has finished more races than not, and Pérez has been the more consistent finisher of the two all season.

So close to points

Points have proven elusive for a specific, almost cruel reason.

Pérez was actually classified tenth in Monaco, which would have been Cadillac's first ever point, before a post-race penalty for a start-procedure infringement dropped him to fifteenth.

That's the kind of margin this team is working with. Not laps off the pace, but a handful of positions and a single penalty away from history.

Zandvoort fit the same pattern. Perez called his own pace "very strong" despite finishing fifteenth, while Bottas retired with his sixth DNF in twelve races.

Progress and pointlessness, sitting right next to each other on the same weekend.

What success really looks like

This is the part casual fans miss when they only track the standings.

A season can be a success by every internal metric a team cares about, closing the gap to the car ahead, extracting more from the tires, building race-simulation confidence, and still produce a zero in the column that actually counts for prize money and prestige.

Aston Martin, for context, has quietly opened up a real gap to Cadillac in the standings this year, and that gap is the actual yardstick Cadillac is racing against, not Red Bull or McLaren.

Whether that's a reasonable way to judge a debut season or just convenient spin from a team with nothing else to point to is a fair question.

Perez himself sounded a lot more frustrated about it back at the summer break than he did at Zandvoort, admitting the team "hasn't developed enough."

So which is the real story here: a new team building patiently toward its breakthrough, or a team quietly cushioning our expectations for a debut season that simply isn't good enough yet?