Cadillac are quietly doing a very good job given their circumstances

It’s only taken a handful of races for them to gradually improve to the point where they can compete with Haas (who should be the main comparison point as they’re the other Ferrari customer team and don’t have gaping issues like Aston) and if not for Checo making errors on the starts in Monaco they would have scored points. And apparently they have another upgrade coming for the next race so should be even faster in Barcelona.

I know Monaco is a bit of an outlier track and there were DNFs which helps, but they’ve still been making steady progress at reducing the gap to the front if you exclude it and judge based off raw performance.

And whilst it doesn’t look so great in isolation for Checo to be competing with Haas, this is mightily impressive considering they only had ~14 months notice for the entry between being told they’re approved and the first pre season test in addition to all the challenges that you face starting up a new team from scratch anyway and the fact that they’re not choosing to use lots of Ferrari parts like Haas to make things easier in their first year or two.

Mario Andretti has already stated they expect to be scoring points by the end of the season and whilst I thought that was quite overambitious at the time I can now see this being a real possibility where they’re capable of scoring if they perform well and things go their way because things should only improve from here as the team gels, the headcount increases and the initial teething issues go away. I’m looking forward to seeing where the team is in 6 or 12 months time, I think there’s lots of reasons to be quietly optimistic.