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With only five race weekends to go now, including this weekend's Mexico City Grand Prix, we are in the stage of the season where grid penalties for new engine parts come thick and fast. We have already seen plenty of them in recent rounds, including last Sunday in Austin where three different drivers served penalties at the start of the United States Grand Prix because they had gone over their annual allowances. And the stewards have confirmed already that at least one driver will do so in the Mexican capital, too.
Drivers are limited to a certain number of each component per season and any new parts beyond that allocation incur automatic grid penalties. The first offence for each different part is worth 10 places on the grid, with five places the punishment for any further new parts beyond that in a season.
For 2026, the allocations of each engine part have not been increased, which seems harsh given the new regulations and that unreliability was always going to be more prevalent this year as a result. Even some of those who have not suffered dramatic engine failures during races have been hit.
To be fair, the same cannot be said of Cadillac. As the newest team on the F1 grid, they have struggled for reliability more than most in many areas across the car, and that includes the engines they have purchased from Ferrari to power their cars.
In Austin last Sunday, Valtteri Bottas suffered his ninth DNF of the season, eight of them because of technical problems on his car. A suspected power unit issue was named as the reason why he pulled over at the side of the track with just a handful of laps remaining.
It seems that failure has prompted Cadillac to fit a swathe of new engine parts to Bottas' car this weekend. The FIA has confirmed a new internal combustion engine, turbocharger, energy story, control electronics unit and kinetic generator unit (MGU-K) have all been added to the Finn's pool.
All of those new components are beyond his annual allowance and all of them are first offences for each specific part. As such, the automatic punishment is a 10-place grid penalty for each of those components, totalling 50 places' worth of grid drops.
Per F1 rules, any accumulative grid drop worth more than 15 places is converted into an automatic back-of-grid start. So, regardless of where he qualifies in Mexico City, Bottas will start the race on the last row.
Bottas was not even the first to drive the car with its new engine parts. That honour fell to Colton Herta, to was in his car for FP1 to earn the final superlicence point he needed to become eligible to race in F1 next year. And that could be key, with the American considered the front-runner to take Bottas' race seat should Cadillac decide to make a change.
Herta is believed to be the favourite while Mercedes reserve Frederik Vesti is a contender, and also took part in FP1 in Mexico. Speaking after the session, Cadillac team principal Marcin Budkowski challenged Bottas to show "more" in the final weeks of the season to give himself the best chance of keeping his seat.
He said: "Valtteri did a really good race in Austin: he was strong in qualifying and he was strong in the race as well, and that's what he needs to do, race in, race out. We've seen weekends where he was on it, on pace with Checo [Sergio Perez] and sometimes even a bit quicker. We need more of that."
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