Cadillac urged to "clean-up" as testing issues persist in Australia F1 practice

Sergio Perez suggests the Cadillac Formula 1 team needs to do a “clean- up” after niggling problems already seen in testing reappeared in Friday practice at the Australian Grand Prix.

Cadillac joins the grid as the 11th team this season, though the American car giant has battled a lot of reliability issues through the pre-season.

Sergio Perez only ran or 14 laps in FP1 and then didn’t complete a timed lap in FP2, stopping on track shortly after leaving the pits in the closing stages.

“It wasn’t the easiest day out there,” said the Mexican.

“We had a lot of issues, a lot of small details that we need to clean up. Hopefully tomorrow we can have a much more straightforward day. That would be ideal for us.”

Asked if such teething problems were expected he said: “Well, in a way yes, but I think we also have some clean-up to do on our side because we’ve been having similar issues since Barcelona.

“I do expect us to do a step forward for tomorrow - hopefully we can have a better day tomorrow.”

Cadillac executive engineering consultant Pat Symonds confirmed that Perez's issues were unrelated to one another, with a fuel system problem striking in FP1 and a hydraulic leak fouling him in FP2.

“We had two separate problems,” he said when asked by Crash.net. “We had a problem with the fuel system just at the end of FP1, and to fix that, we had to take the battery out, which is quite a long job.

“So he was out late, and then unfortunately, totally unrelated, he had a hydraulic leak, which we haven't yet analysed.”

Symonds conceded that it was a challenging day for the team, as it was the first time that it had to get both cars out of the garage and on track at the same time.

“Putting two cars out there is not twice as difficult as one car,” he said. “It's like four times as difficult. There's so much going on. One of the things that's really important in the team is having continuity.

“And by definition, we can't have continuity. We've got a lot of people working together for the first time, and I think they were remarkable over the testing that we've done this winter and through our first day of competition, I think the team have performed absolutely superbly.”

The team also gathered some useful data with Valtteri Bottas.

“I think we had while we had a very troubled day with Checo, we had really a pretty normal Friday with Valtteri.

We did the work we needed to do. We got the answers we needed to get. I think it was a very successful day. We go into tomorrow with a lot more knowledge.”

Symonds conceded that it wasn’t easy to get a handle on what is required at the track for what promises to be a complicated qualifying session. "I think a lot of teams spent several days in Bahrain just figuring it all out. We haven't got several days here. We’ve got a few hours. And of course, in China [a sprint], we’ve got one hour.

“So it's not an easy thing to do. But again, we learned a lot in Bahrain. And of course, these days, you do an awful lot by simulation. You don't need to be running a car on the track all the time.

“So we will see some different things in qualifying, but I'm quite confident people will get on top of it.”