Sergio Perez adamant Monaco won’t be last chance for Cadillac to score points in F1 2026

Sergio Perez is confident that the Monaco Grand Prix won't be Cadillac's only shot at scoring points during its debut Formula 1 season.

Last weekend Perez was able to take advantage of attrition ahead and penalties for others to climb into the top 10 at the flag, despite getting a penalty himself earlier in the race for inadvertently starting in the grid slot left vacant by Gabriel Bortoleto, two spots ahead of his own.

However after the race he received a second penalty for being outside his grid box at the restart, which dropped him behind Fernando Alonso and out of the points.

“It was a bit of mixed emotions,” he said of the Monaco race. “Obviously it was a really fantastic race with everything that happened, everything that came to us during that race. We had every single issue that you could imagine.

“And then the race gave us an opportunity, which we grabbed with both hands. And unfortunately I got the penalty in the end, which made it a little bit unsweeter.”

Perez is adamant that he will have another chance to score points over the course of the year.

“At the end it's one point,” he said of Monaco. “I believe that the season will not be defined by one point.

“As long as we keep improving and we keep in the right trajectory, if we find a little bit more pace and we are a little bit closer in normal tracks, I think with the level that I'm operating at, I will be able to get them back.”

Asked where he thought the next chance might come he said: “I would have never expected Monaco, but Monaco is a very chaotic race, or it was a very chaotic race. Normally, it's not.

“You never know when the next opportunity will come. We just have to make sure we are there, as we were [last] weekend, and maximise everything operationally, and everything from my side as well. And I'm confident they will come.”

Meanwhile Perez conceded that his mistake at the first start in Monaco could have been avoided had the team reminded him that Bortoleto was absent from the grid, while suggesting he was out of position at the restart because he was pushing to the limit on tyre warm-up.

“I think the first one is something we can clean up in the communication as well,” he said when asked by Crash.net about the errors.

“But obviously I take the responsibility, and at the same time, when you operate so much on the limit as a driver, I've had good starts because I maximise every single centimetre, I try to keep my tyres warm as possible, that means that I do my burnouts as close as possible to the box.

“So everything I put it down to every centimetre and to the limit, and I went over it a bit. But at the end of the day, where I put the car, we didn't have the pace to do it, so there's still a lot of positives to take.”

He added: “I was down in the shadow, even when they tried to do to see the CCTV camera, they couldn't, there's a tree on top of it, so there was a bit of a shadow.

“I put it down to just bring too much on the limit, trying to get with get in there with the tyres as hot as possible, and so making my burnouts as late as possible, and it wasn't as clear to me."

Perez noted that this weekend’s Barcelona race will provide a good indication of how much performance the team has found since the January test at the same venue.

“It will be nice to see here,” he said. “I think here will be more of a normal picture of where we are, how much progress we made since we were here in January.

“I don't expect us to be as close as we were in the last two, three weekends, but we just have to keep finding as much as possible, as soon as possible.”

Regarding how the car has been improved he said: “I think we haven't evolved much in ride. I think come a long way in terms of load. I think in one area we haven't made much progress, but in load, in aero, we made some good progress.”