Formula 1’s newest team arrives at the Hungaroring for the last race before the summer break. A three-way title fight is heating up front, a new $215 million cost cap is rewriting team budgets, and Budapest has turned the whole city into part of the race weekend.
Fresh off the Belgian Grand Prix, the Cadillac Formula 1® Team heads to Budapest for Round 11 of the 2026 season at the Hungaroring, home of the Hungarian Grand Prix.
The Hungaroring has hosted a round of the championship every year since 1986. Only Monza has a longer unbroken run. Back then, it was groundbreaking for a different reason: Hungary was F1’s first stop behind the Iron Curtain, and the debut race drew somewhere between 200,000 and 220,000 spectators from across the Eastern Bloc.
The track itself is unusual for a permanent circuit. Its corners run together in tight, medium-low speed sequences that make it feel more like a scaled-up kart track, or, as drivers often put it, Monaco without the walls. Overtaking is hard to come by on the short straights, so races here tend to get decided on strategy instead. The summer heat doesn’t help matters. Temperatures climb, the asphalt bakes, tires wear fast, and teams end up chasing track position through extra pit stops rather than pace alone.
Test driver Colton Herta gets a hand in that work this weekend, stepping in for Valtteri Bottas in first practice while juggling his own Formula 2 program. It’s his second F1 session of the year, following his debut in Barcelona back in June.
Team Principal Graeme Lowdon is bracing for another scorcher, though he thinks the Hungaroring’s characteristics might suit the car better than Spa did last week. He called the first half of Cadillac’s debut season encouraging, but said reliability is still the team’s unfinished business – more laps mean a clearer picture of the MAC-26 and where development needs to go next. One focus this weekend: putting mileage on the new brake drums brought in after the issue the team hit in Austria, tested through a run of race simulations designed to let both drivers get the most out of the car. Lowdon has been consistent on one point all season – there are no shortcuts here, everything the team faces is new, and the gains are coming in small, constant steps.
Both drivers have history at this track. Bottas won here in GP3 back in 2011 and made his F1 debut at the Hungaroring the following year, later finishing on the podium in 2017 and 2020. Perez took a podium in the 2010 GP2 feature race and has started 14 Hungarian Grands Prix since, with a podium of his own in 2023.
Perez pointed to the difficulty of back-to-back weekends on tracks this different from each other – analyzing the last race, prepping for the next, bringing new parts, all while trying to squeeze the best out of the team at F1’s current pace. He said the group feels prepared and is pulling in the same direction, and that the goal now is to head into the break on a strong note.
Bottas said finishing a full race distance in Belgium felt like progress, and that the car seemed closer to the midfield than it’s been. He’s expecting Hungary to play more to the car’s strengths and wants to carry that momentum into the shutdown. He also mentioned the crowd factor – a lot of Finnish fans make the trip to this race, and he’ll be looking for their flags in the stands.
Herta called his second FP1 outing a good chance to build his own experience, though he framed the bigger picture as helping the team. Six weeks have passed since he was last in the car, and in that time the MAC-26 has changed a fair amount. His job, as he sees it, is twofold: give the race drivers the best shot at a strong weekend, and pass along feedback that feeds Cadillac’s longer-term development.
Hungary closes out the first half of the season before F1 shuts its factories for three weeks. Cadillac has covered 836 laps and 4,331 km (2,691 mi) through ten races, with both cars finishing in China, Japan, Miami and Great Britain. The high point so far came in China, where Bottas finished 13th and Perez 15th – still the team’s best result and its best combined finish.
The championship picture ahead of Hungary is about as clear as it’s been all year. Kimi Antonelli leads on 204 points. Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari sits second on 159, with teammate George Russell third on 154 – enough to give Mercedes a 358-285 cushion over Ferrari in the constructors’ standings. Charles Leclerc is fourth on 126, and McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri round out the top six on 103 and 92.
Max Verstappen sits seventh on 91 points, well below where he’s used to running, and his season has become something of a running argument with F1’s own rulebook. The 2026 rules require nearly half a car’s power to come from the battery, and Verstappen has been unhappy about it since preseason. After retiring in China back in round two, he wrote off the new-look racing as gimmicky – drivers boosting past each other, running out of charge, then getting boosted right back on the next straight – and suggested that anyone who found that entertaining didn’t understand real racing. He’s kept scoring points anyway, but Red Bull’s rocky adjustment to the new power unit and chassis rules is a big part of why the team sits fourth in the constructors’ table instead of fighting for the title it held not long ago.
The midfield is more scrambled than usual. Alpine’s Pierre Gasly (42) and Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson (39) sit at the top of a pack that also includes rookie Arvid Lindblad, Franco Colapinto and Haas’s Oliver Bearman, none more than two dozen points apart. Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto and Williams’s Carlos Sainz Jr. and Alex Albon sit just behind them, while Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso has just a single point to show for a rough season.
Cadillac and Nico Hlkenberg round out the standings, all three still building toward a first points finish this season. It’s the expected position for a brand-new operation absorbing a full rules reset while standing up an entire engineering department at once, and Lowdon’s talk of no shortcuts and steady mileage reads like a team focused on its baseline rather than the table. There’s real reason for optimism this weekend, too: the Hungaroring’s slow, high-downforce corners tend to favor cars still finding their aerodynamic feet more than a power-heavy track like Spa does, which makes it a plausible spot for Cadillac to close in on the midfield for the first time.
This season brought the biggest shake-up to F1’s financial rules since the cost cap first went in. The base figure jumped from $135 million to $215 million, though the increase isn’t really about letting teams spend more – it’s about bringing costs that used to sit outside the cap, especially power-unit development, inside it for the first time. The change also shut down a loophole that had let engine manufacturers keep some of that spending off their books entirely, something the FIA confirmed as part of the broader 2026 rules overhaul.
Cadillac is the clearest example of what the new math actually costs a team building from scratch. Before it ran a single competitive lap, General Motors and TWG Motorsports had already put more than $1 billion into getting the operation off the ground. A $450 million anti-dilution fee went straight to the ten existing teams. Around $275 million more built out facilities in Fishers, Indiana; Concord, North Carolina; Warren, Michigan; and Silverstone, England. Close to $150 million went into the engine program alone, covering the GM Power Unit’s development while the team runs on Ferrari power through 2028. All of that sits on top of the $215 million operating budget every team, including Cadillac, now works within for 2026.
Independent estimates from motorsport financial analysts peg Cadillac’s 2026 prize money at $40-55 million, a typical figure for a team with no championship history, compared with $80-100 million or more for F1’s established front-runners. Those same estimates put the resulting funding gap – the difference sponsorship and commercial deals need to cover – somewhere in the $150-175 million range, a challenge every new manufacturer entry has faced in some form, including Haas when it joined the grid. Inside GM, the investment is reportedly being treated as a longer-horizon bet, with the bigger payoff expected closer to 2029 or 2032 once the in-house engine program is fully up and running, and 2026 viewed as the first, foundational year of that build.
The Hungaroring’s own numbers show a smaller version of F1’s pricing squeeze. Three-day general admission runs pound 160 this year, up from pound 150 in 2025. Grandstand prices range from pound 230 for the Fan stand up through pound 270-335 for Grand Prix and Apex seating, and as high as pound 630-735 for the Hungaroring and Platinum stands on the front straight. The VIP Fan Lounge goes for pound 1,850. Almost every price tier climbed again this year, and Sunday tickets sold out well before race week, leaving only scattered Friday and Saturday inventory by the final days.
This is the 41st Hungarian Grand Prix, marking 40 years since the Hungaroring’s first race in 1986, and organizers have used the anniversary to push the fan experience further outside the track gates than usual. New this year is a standalone Thursday ticket – pound 35 for adults, pound 10 for kids under 15 – that gets fans into the circuit without needing a race pass at all. It covers the grounds, the Hungaroring grandstand, and an afternoon watching the safety and medical cars run high-speed tests, plus the day’s stage programming. It does not cover the separately ticketed Pit Lane Walk.
Over the full weekend, the fan activity splits across three areas. The Main Hub, behind the Main Grandstand, is the traditional center of things – food, shopping, the atmosphere regulars come back for. The newer Entertainment Zone at Turn 12 has become the louder option, with stage shows, DJs, and driver or team principal appearances drawing bigger crowds. A third area near Turn 9, quieter by design, gives fans somewhere to sit down with local food and browse exhibitions instead.
There’s plenty to do beyond the racing itself – sim rigs, a pit stop challenge, show cars, driver photo stations, and a mock podium, plus fairground extras like a zipline (HUF 16,000 a ride), a giant swing (HUF 4,000), bumper cars (HUF 3,000) and a Ferris wheel (HUF 4,000 for adults, HUF 3,000 for kids). Drivers show up for meet-and-greets Friday and Saturday mornings, with team principal interviews both afternoons – sessions where Lowdon and his drivers are likely to draw a strong American and Finnish crowd, Bottas especially.
The anniversary push has spilled into Budapest itself. There’s an installation at Heroes’ Square, a Hungaroring-branded boat running events on the Danube through race week, and flags lining bridges across the city, with misting stations set up to help visitors handle the heat. Forty years after F1 first raced behind the Iron Curtain here, the race weekend has grown well past the circuit gates – and this year, it’s happening while an American manufacturer works through its first season on the same track where it all started.