Boost Button Analysis
of 22 drivers
of 22 drivers
the championship leader's pace
at Suzuka — Cadillac misses one entirely
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 Perez 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.
How We Measure
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.
Results
Season Leaderboard
Average score across Australia · China · Japan · Cadillac drivers in Platinum
Cadillac vs. the Field — Race by Race
Per-race score; field median (unweighted) for reference
Suzuka — Zone-by-Zone
Per-zone score 0–1; dashed line is the field's best per zone
What It Means
Cadillac · The Coverage Story
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.
Suzuka Z2 · Dunlop / Degner
Both Perez 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.
Where They Are Correct
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.
Championship Context
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.
What's Next
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.