When Cadillac hits the boost — a championship-weighted look at 2026 Manual Override Mode usage across the field, with Pérez and Bottas as the lens. 2026 season, through Japan.
After three races, Cadillac's drivers sit P17 and P18 of 22 on 2026 Manual Override usage — and the gap is widening. At Suzuka, both Pérez and Bottas score effectively zero on the Dunlop / Degner straight while the championship-leading drivers cover that zone top-to-bottom. It's a coverage problem, not a timing problem: when they do deploy, they're roughly in the right place; they're just not deploying often enough on the zones the leaders use.
The 2026 Power Unit caps the MGU-K at 350 kW and tapers default deployment from 290 to 345 km/h. Manual Override Mode — the "boost button" — extends 350 kW deployment to higher speeds. We can't see the button being pressed in public telemetry, but we can see the consequence: the car keeps accelerating at high speed when it otherwise wouldn't.
From every driver's top-5 fastest clean race laps we flag bins where throttle ≥ 95% and either speed ≥ 245 km/h with positive spatial acceleration, or speed ≥ 295 km/h. We then aggregate across the field — weighted by championship rank — to find the optimal boost zones for that race. Each driver gets a 0–100 score for how closely their own deployments line up with those zones.
What's new: the optimal-zone definition is now championship-weighted. The drivers leading the standings going into a race carry more weight when defining where the truly correct deployment zones are. Read the full methodology for the equations and the F1 points-scale weight curve.
P17 and P18 isn't a one-off. Both Cadillac drivers trended down across the three races and finished Suzuka nearly 10 points below the field median. The pattern is consistent: when they boost, they boost in roughly the right place; they just don't boost enough.
Both Pérez and Bottas score 0.01 on Suzuka's Dunlop zone — a flat zero. The field's best on that zone is 0.96. Neither driver is using boost through that flowing high-speed sequence at all.
Hairpin Exit Straight (Z3) is a clean 0.98 for both Cadillac drivers — equal to the field's best. The deployment instinct out of slow corners is sound. The miss is on the medium-speed flow zones.
The championship-weighted aggregation reframes the bar: Cadillac is being measured against where the points leaders deploy. Outside-top-10 drivers don't pull the optimal definition at all — the standard is set by the front of the grid.
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia next. Two very different deployment profiles — Bahrain's Sector 1 is a textbook power-unit track with three big straights; Saudi is a flowing high-speed challenge where Manual Override timing matters more than coverage. We'll see whether Cadillac's coverage problem follows the team to a different track shape, or whether Suzuka's miss on Dunlop is geometry-specific.