Crazy: Valtteri Bottas/Cadillac deliberately crashed into the wall in Hungary

Valtteri Bottas’s 257th Formula 1 World Championship race came to a rather unusual end: the 36-year-old Finn deliberately crashed his Cadillac into a wall at the entrance to the pit lane at the Hungaroring!

The background: The new Formula 1 team, Cadillac, has repeatedly struggled with brake problems on its MAC-26 model. Bottas retired in Monaco. Overheated brakes in Spain. Both Bottas and Sergio Pérez were forced out at the Red Bull Ring due to failing brakes. And now yet another brake problem, once again affecting Valtteri. And those are just the difficulties during the races.

The Hungaroring is known as a brake-killer, partly due to the typically high ambient temperatures. Cadillac prepared for this with improved cooling inlets. But after just ten of the 70 laps in Hungary, GP veteran Bottas reported the first problems over the radio.

The ten-time Grand Prix winner (runner-up in the World Championship with Mercedes in 2019 and 2020) then rolled towards the pits on lap 15 with his front-left brake on fire; as he approached, he scraped his car along the right-hand side of the wall to bring it to a halt.

Bottas said afterwards: “The new brake ventilation system was actually supposed to solve our problems, but clearly that wasn’t enough in such extreme conditions as we had in Hungary.”

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“The brakes got too hot, and it got to the point where the overheating caused a fire, which of course ruins everything. Once I realised something was wrong with the brakes, I wanted to bring the car back to the pits, but on the way back I lost all braking power – the brake lines must have burnt out. That’s why I had to drive the car into the wall.”

“I hope we’ll have a solution in place for the upcoming World Championship race at Zandvoort after the summer break.”