Sergio Pérez

Sergio Pérez has built one of the more unusual and durable careers on the modern Formula 1 grid, and Cadillac's decision to build their brand-new team partly around him tells you most of what you need to know about how highly he's regarded by people inside the sport. Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Pérez came up through karting with backing that stretched all the way to sponsors and mentors keen to see the country produce another serious F1 contender after Mexico's long wait since its motorsport golden age. He made his debut with Sauber in 2011 and quickly built a reputation as one of the smartest tyre managers in the sport — a driver who could nurse a set of tyres several laps longer than seemed possible and use that patience to pick off faster cars late in a Grand Prix.

That skill carried him through spells at McLaren, Force India and Racing Point, years defined less by outright pace than by remarkable consistency and an ability to be exactly where the points were on a given Sunday, regardless of what car he was driving. The signature moment of that period arrived at the chaotic, rain-hit 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix, where Pérez recovered from a lap down to win his first Grand Prix in what remains one of the most dramatic victories of recent seasons — a result that finally forced the paddock to stop calling him merely a reliable points-scorer.

That win helped earn him one of the biggest promotions of his career: a seat at Red Bull from 2021, partnering Max Verstappen. Pérez rose to the assignment better than most had expected early on, delivering multiple race wins and playing a genuine supporting role in Red Bull's constructors' championship successes, at times looking like the closest thing to a title threat Verstappen faced from within his own team. But the comparison, inevitably, weighed heavier as the seasons went on, and a run of difficult results eventually cost him the seat after 2024 — a painful ending to what had, for a stretch, been the best chapter of his career.

Rather than fading from the grid, Pérez has landed at Cadillac, the newest team in Formula 1's history, bringing genuine multiple-race-winning experience and years spent at a championship-calibre team to a project building itself completely from scratch. For a brand-new constructor, having a driver who already understands what it takes to win at the highest level, and who's spent over a decade extracting results from every kind of car imaginable, is an enormous asset. It's a fresh, different kind of challenge for Pérez — not chasing wins alongside the sport's benchmark driver anymore, but leading a new team's ambitions from the very front of the project himself.