Sergio Perez called on Cadillac to investigate after a front-right suspension failure ended his Canadian Grand Prix on lap 39, just as he was heading toward the pit lane at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
Perez’s car collapsed after he came off the back straight, forcing him to limp back to the garage and retire from the race. He said the problem was something the team had to “investigate, understand, and hopefully get on top of,” because what happened was “not ideal.”
The failure came after a race in which Cadillac tried a risky strategy in changing weather. Perez was one of seven drivers to start on intermediate tyres, and he said the team made the wrong call early. “The laps to the grid, it felt like it was 50-50. It was really hard to choose a tyre,” he said. “And then when we went into the race with so many aborts, the rain calmed down quite a bit, and it was a lot clearer for the slick tyre.”
He said the team “took the gamble” but “killed the inter within three laps,” adding that the tyre choice became a problem almost immediately. Only Carlos Sainz managed to salvage something from the intermediate gamble, finishing ninth. Perez, by contrast, said Cadillac had “some good pace out there” and “some good fights with the Haas” before the suspension failure ended his afternoon.
The result mattered because this was Cadillac’s fifth grand prix, and Perez did not hide his frustration with how the team is operating. “Operationally, we are still lacking a lot, and we are not making progress in terms of performance, so we need to maximise the car performance at the moment,” he said. He added that the team was “in a massive hurry” because it was “not maximising the results.”
Perez said Cadillac was making progress on performance, but the operational side was still far behind. “But on the operational side, it’s something that we are lacking tremendously, and we have to really find our way for the European season now,” he said. That leaves the team with a clear task before the next phase of the campaign: sort out the mechanical issue that ended the race, and make the calls around strategy and execution that Perez says are still too slow.
The suspension collapse on lap 39 added a blunt ending to a weekend that had already exposed how narrow the margins were in the wet-dry shuffle at Montreal. Perez’s complaint was not only about the part that failed, but about a team he believes must move faster if it wants results to follow.
