F1 News: Bottas Penalty Carried Over from 2024 is Meaningless

With the 2026 Formula 1 season just weeks away, the paddock is alive with anticipation for the biggest regulatory reset in years: lighter cars, active aerodynamics, 100% sustainable fuels, and an expanded 11-team grid featuring the all-new Cadillac squad. Pre-season testing in Bahrain is set for mid-February, but the spotlight is already on Melbourne, where the Australian Grand Prix will kick off the campaign on March 6-8 at Albert Park.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

For Valtteri Bottas (pictured), the Finnish veteran making his return after a year as Mercedes reserve in 2025, the comeback comes with an unusual footnote. Back in the 2024 Abu Dhabi finale—his last race for the struggling Sauber team—he collided with Kevin Magnussen’s Haas at Turn 6. Stewards blamed Bottas for a significant misjudgment, issuing a five-place grid penalty and three super license points. Since it was the season-ender, the drop had nowhere to land… until now.

Valtteri Bottas, Stake F1 Team KICK Sauber, speaks to the media; 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, Formula One World Championship. Image courtesy of Sauber F1 team.

The penalty, frozen under the old rules, carries over to his next grand prix start: the 2026 Australian opener. A new 12-month expiry clause in the updated sporting regulations would have wiped it out if applied retroactively, but the FIA has confirmed it stands. Team principal Graeme Lowdon called it a quirky timing issue, but the team has taken it in stride. Bottas himself remains unfazed: “It’s five places. We’ve got far bigger things to worry about.”

And those bigger things are real. Cadillac enters as a true rookie operation—fresh from the ground up, with a UK base near Silverstone, American hubs, and Ferrari customer engines. Sergio Perez, the street-circuit specialist fresh off his Red Bull exit, partners Bottas in what the team hopes will be a steady, experienced duo to guide development. But expectations are grounded: new teams rarely hit the ground running. Pre-season whispers suggest Cadillac’s focus is reliability and data collection over outright pace. Testing data so far points to a car likely battling at the rear, with Q1 survival—not Q3 dreams—the realistic target.

Come qualifying in Melbourne, if Bottas extracts everything from the green-liveried machine and lines up in P22 (the last spot on a 24-car grid), that five-place drop becomes pure paperwork. P22 becomes P27? Mathematically impossible. The penalty evaporates into irrelevance—he’d start from the back row anyway, or perhaps the pit lane if stewards deem it necessary. The ghost from Yas Marina, lingering across seasons, teams, and rulebooks, arrives only to find its victim already consigned to the very rear.

In the Cadillac garage, the mood is pragmatic. Engineers joke about the “free extra sim runs” from the quali effort, while Bottas climbs into the cockpit with his trademark calm. The Ice Man knows the real test isn’t five grid spots—it’s surviving the opening laps, gathering crucial data, and building toward competitiveness in a season where everything resets.

The carryover penalty? A curious historical quirk, meaningless in practice. For Cadillac and Bottas, the true challenge is the long climb from the back. As the Melbourne sun sets on the first practice sessions, the focus shifts from old sentences to new beginnings—one cautious lap at a time.