Baku 2026: Pérez's Five Podiums and the Cadillac Still Without Points

In 2026, at Baku, Sergio Pérez collided with his Force India teammate Esteban Ocon while both were fighting for position near the front. Pérez's car was damaged and he retired. It was a wrong decision — placing an intra-team battle above the team result. On a street circuit, mistakes always cost more. The gap between a podium and a wrecked car is only a few centimetres on the uneven kerbs of the old city. Nine years later, Pérez returns to Azerbaijan in Cadillac colours. Four podiums and one victory here, plus another in older colours, have made Baku the territory of the Mexican driver. In that ranking, people place him above Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso. But in the 2026 season, before the Azerbaijan round takes place, he has not scored a single point. That contrast is the starting point of any story about Pérez and Baku. It is also why I look at this race through data rather than memory. Baku is a street circuit with a peculiar structure. The asphalt has low grip, braking is heavy, and the main straight runs 2.2 km with two DRS zones. But there is a feature rarely mentioned: tyre degradation here is very low. That makes a one-stop strategy entirely viable, and track position matters more than raw pace. In a race where a Safety Car appears almost by default, whoever can preserve tyres over a long stint has a bigger edge than whoever can simply lap fast once. I have spent months re-watching Baku rounds to understand why Pérez succeeds here. Those podiums did not come from superior pace. They came from tyre management and reading the moment. When the rear tyres are on low-grip asphalt, avoiding wheelspin and keeping temperatures stable is a harder skill than it looks. Pérez does it better than most of his contemporaries. It is a transitional skill — not the transition between two stints, but the transition between two decisions: attack or preserve. Cadillac 2026 is a completely new team. This is their first racing season, with a modest goal: a first points finish. In that context, Baku is the only round where they can dream of a good result, thanks to the Safety Car mechanism, low tyre wear, and the high unpredictability of a street circuit. New teams benefit from reverse-order ATR and the Cost Cap, but those investments need time to bear fruit. A single race is not the place to wait for structure. Let us split the problem into three layers. The first layer is car pace. The Cadillac is almost certainly not fast enough to reach the top 10 on pure pace. I place them at the back of the grid, based on the fact that they have not scored a point this season. On a track shaped like Baku, mechanical grip weaknesses surface at slow corners and braking zones, where the old city forces the driver to handle sudden grip changes. Every tactical diagram begins with a shaky hand-drawn line on PowerPoint. The first line I drew for Cadillac at Baku was the corner-entry speed curve, some 20 km/h lower than the midfield. The second layer is strategy. A new team has structural advantages in the long term: reverse-order ATR, tight financial balance. But in a single race, those advantages do not translate into points. At Baku, Cadillac needs an adaptive strategy: an early stop during a Safety Car, or a long stint to wait things out. That is a game of probability rather than planning. A clean race, with no Safety Car, renders every calculation meaningless. The third layer is the driver. This is where I disagree with the orthodox narrative. The King of Baku story rests on historical data. But that data was built inside the cockpits of Force India, Racing Point and Red Bull, cars ranging from the midfield to the front. There, Pérez had enough pace to stay near the top five and wait for chances. The 2026 Cadillac does not. The difference between these two situations is not the driver's skill level. It is the quality of the tool. A superb driver in a weak car can still make a difference, but that difference sits around P14 or P15, not on the podium. There is a notable detail in the history. Pérez's podium finishes at Baku did not only come from correct moves. They also came from cars ahead running into trouble, colliding, or making strategy errors. That does not diminish the achievement, but it reveals the probabilistic structure behind it. Transition is not a stretch of running. It is the silence between two intentions that few can read. And at Baku, that silence is usually filled by chaos, not by speed. This is the point where I believe many observers fall into a trap. When Cadillac announced Pérez's return to Baku, the five-podium story was repeated as a credible signal. But between Pérez being able to exploit Baku and Cadillac being able to score at Baku there is a large gap. Pérez is good at exploiting chances. But chances only exist if there is a Safety Car, if cars retire, if strategic chaos unfolds. In other words, Cadillac's points target does not depend on the driver's talent. It depends on the degree of uncertainty in the race. That is an uncomfortable dependency, because it turns a plan into a hope. When there is no football, I draw football. And it turns out drawing is a way of understanding. When there is no Cadillac data, I draw assumptions, and my first tool is always the Safety Car probability at Baku, currently above 70 percent by the circuit's historical record. There is one more overlooked point: Pérez's teammate. If I do not yet have confirmed data on the second driver, every assessment of him lacks a reference. You cannot know whether a driver is fast or slow without someone to compare him against. This is the biggest data gap in any analysis of Cadillac 2026. And to return to 2026, the event I opened with, there is another warning. Pérez once placed personal interest above the team's on a day when the car was fast enough for a podium. On a chaotic circuit, that tendency can return. A new team building a culture needs internal discipline more than an intra-team battle. How should Baku 2026 be read? I will watch three things. First, the degree of dependence on the Safety Car. If the race runs cleanly, Cadillac has virtually no route. Second, Pérez's performance relative to his teammate in the first stint. Third, any sign of adaptive strategy: early stops, extended stints, or simply preserving the car. If Pérez scores at Baku, it will be a story about reading the race. It will not necessarily be a story about the speed of the Cadillac. The circuit will answer, not the story.