The First Number Didn't Add Up: Cadillac-Perez, Zero Points and the Singapore Street-Circuit Ledger

The First Number Didn't Add Up

After the chequered flag at the Singapore Grand Prix, one number refused to sit in my ledger. Zero points. And 23rd place in the drivers' championship. In the 2026 season, Formula 1 runs 22 cars on the grid — 11 teams, two drivers each. So where, mathematically, does a 23rd place park itself on a 22-car field? Either the number is wrong, or there is a structure behind it that the standard grid arithmetic does not recognise. For nine years my habit has been simple: when a number does not reconcile, I do not guess — I open the spreadsheet.

Opening it showed that this Singapore weekend was never a plain 'Perez lost' story. It is a story of cost, of structure, and of a near-impossible recovery. What nobody is spelling out is this — a 20th-place grid slot combined with a street circuit like Marina Bay makes points recovery close to impossible, and that impossibility was calculable on paper before the lights went out.

Context: A Night Street Circuit and the Eleventh Team

Marina Bay is one of the most unforgiving tracks on the calendar. It is not a permanent circuit but city streets — walls on both sides, no run-off, immediate punishment for error. The race distance sits around 308 kilometres, the lap count in the low sixties, and the corners come so thickly that the car almost never takes a full breath across a lap. Overtaking here has historically been difficult — that is my own watching experience, having replayed onboard footage from this night race across several seasons. Track position matters more than raw pace.

Now the structure. In the 2026 season, Cadillac is a new constructor in Formula 1 — the eleventh team on the grid. A new team means a new car, new systems, a new mechanical philosophy, and with it the familiar 'gelling phase' — the period of discovering the relationship between car and track. One of its drivers is Sergio 'Checo' Perez: experienced, a man who has fought for championships, patient with car development. At the front of the grid sits Max Verstappen — pole, sprint win, that old monopoly picture again.

The weekend ran to the sprint format, meaning less practice, less learning time, less room for error. And in this weekend Perez named his car's problem himself — load, suspension and absorption described as 'very deficient'. His qualifying slot: 20th. Then a sprint collision with Lance Stroll, and the stewards' ruling — greater responsibility on Perez's side, but no penalty. Zero points. 23rd.

Core Analysis: A Full Cost Ledger of One Weekend

I laid this weekend out like a ledger, because my habit is to break down a number that does not reconcile — as I would with a transfer fee. Here is what came back.

Line one — the qualifying deficit. A 20th-place grid slot is not merely 'not fast enough'; it is the start of a chain reaction. On a street circuit, 20th means the dirty air, the traffic, and the tyre-temperature fight of nineteen cars ahead of you.

Line two — the circuit factor. Overtaking is hard at Marina Bay; that is not new information. But combined with a 20th slot, the arithmetic changes. On a street circuit, starting from the back strips away strategic freedom too — because an undercut or overcut window only opens when you are inside a rival's gearbox. From 20th, you are never there.

Line three — the sprint collision. The clash with Stroll is not just an incident; it is an expense. Damage, lost track position, and the valuable data that stint was meant to collect.

Line four — the stewards' ruling. This is the most interesting entry. The stewards assigned greater responsibility to Perez but imposed no penalty. In Formula 1 accounting, that is a 'guilty but unsanctioned' verdict. A reputational mark is recorded; no grid cost is paid.

Line five — the points arithmetic. Zero. This zero is different from most zeroes, because it arrived in a new team's first season, on a street circuit, in a sprint weekend.

Line six — the championship position. 23rd. On a 22-car grid, that number does not fit. This is where my suspicion thickens — the figure is either a rushed journalistic error, or it signals something the report does not state. If a number fights its own grid arithmetic, the rest of the numbers deserve separate verification.

Line seven — financial data. Here the ledger is empty. Perez's salary, Cadillac's budget, their position against the cost cap — none of it appears. Where football has FFP and PSR, motorsport has the FIA Cost Cap, and that data is missing too. So I will not write a guess in this column; keeping an empty cell empty is the honest move.

Line eight — driver-market leverage. Just as a weak football season erodes a player's bargaining power, a driver's paddock value shifts the same way. Zero points and a 20th slot bring no advantage to a contract table. Contract terms are undisclosed, so this is another empty cell — but the direction is negative, and that needs no data to infer.

Line nine — the new entrant's capital. Cadillac has manufacturer-scale backing behind it, and a new entrant's early seasons typically run at a loss. This is an industry pattern, not a sourced fact — so I label it clearly: inference.

Line ten — data. Many skip this column. A failed weekend is a goldmine for a new team, because you learn where the car suddenly works — which corner, which temperature, which setup. Perez's own phrase, 'one of the strongest laps I have done around here', is not a trophy, but it is data.

Contrarian Angle: The Official Story and the Ledger Tell Different Tales

The official story is simple: the car is bad, the driver is good. Perez himself said it — the problem is load, suspension, absorption. The statement is mechanical and specific, so it sounds credible. But there is a gap. When an experienced driver names his own car's suspension in front of the media, that is not just a technical report — it is a pressure signal aimed at the team's engineering group. Just as footballers use the media to force transfer pressure, drivers use the same tactic to lobby for upgrades.

A second gap is journalistic. The report carries a Bahrain practice-session photograph attached to a Singapore story. Small thing — but it shows how loosely the content was assembled. Which raises the question: was a number like 23rd place also placed in the same rush?

This is where the ledger took me somewhere unexpected. The weekend's real winner is not Verstappen — he won, that was expected. The real gain went to the broadcast narrative that bundles Verstappen's victory and Perez's despair into one frame to hold viewers. The stewards' 'guilty but unsanctioned' ruling works on the same logic — a penalty would have killed next race's story; a mark without a penalty keeps it alive. An empty stand still pays its wages, and here empty points are paying their narrative — that is the story.

The Next Domino: From 23rd, Where?

So what is the next domino? My ledger says the coming races cannot be predicted from here — because nobody has the date for Cadillac's next car upgrade. What can be predicted is a timeline: if points do not arrive within the next two to three races, the driver's seat question moves into the paddock, and by then it will no longer be a technical debate — it will be a contract debate. P20 was not a highlight; it was a contract event — one still unwritten, with only a draft on the table.

One cell stays empty in my ledger — the explanation for 23rd place. If a number questions its own field arithmetic, every analysis built on it stays half-reliable until it is corrected. My next task is clear: log Cadillac's pit-wall decisions in the next race, and watch whether the car's problem is genuinely mechanical — or whether that problem has been a convenient language all along.