The Mexico-Flag Shirt and the Gap on a Rookie Team's Scoreboard

In a photograph posted in early September, Checo Pérez wears a shirt striped in green, white and red. He stands at an angle, one hand in his pocket, eyes straight into the lens. Behind him, the logo of a newly launched Formula 1 team sits beside the logo of an American fashion house. There is nothing remarkable about the image — until you know that, at the moment it was taken, that team had still not scored a single point in its debut season.

That is the detail I keep. A shirt released precisely for Mexico's national holiday, woven in the colours of a country's flag, draped over a driver who holds that nationality. And behind all of it, a machine that has not finished often enough to earn a single point.

I cover football, not motor racing. But one thing I have learned after years standing on training pitches and sitting in press rooms: the way a sports organisation tells its own story, when results have not yet arrived, usually reveals more than the standings do. A newly promoted club, a club under new ownership, a club that has just sold its spine — they all pass through the same phase: the communications arm runs ahead of the sporting arm. The story below, about Cadillac, General Motors' Formula 1 team, is an example of that phase.

Cadillac entered the 2026 Formula 1 season as a rookie outfit. This is their first season at the highest level of motor racing. Behind them stands General Motors, an enormous American industrial group. What does that mean? It means the team is not a private group scraping money together to build a car; it has an owner deep enough to absorb the first few seasons, while results are still absent.

Their driver pairing is Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez, known as Checo. Both are drivers who have won races at the top level. Bottas was once teammate to a multiple champion at a leading team; Pérez has won races across several teams. This is the kind of personnel choice anyone who follows sport recognises: instead of betting on a young driver, the rookie team chooses two men who have proven their ability, are used to the pressure of the track, and know how to work inside a large organisation.

The original report I read was written in Spanish. It is a commercial item: Cadillac and Tommy Hilfiger have partnered to launch an apparel collection for Mexico's national holiday. The collection uses the colours of the Mexican flag. Checo Pérez models the shirt, with the number 11 on his chest — his race number. Tommy Hilfiger is a fashion brand owned by PVH Corp. This is a two-way brand-licensing arrangement: the team's logo beside the fashion house's logo, rather than a title sponsorship injecting cash directly into the team's budget.

And this is the most important thing in the entire report: Cadillac has not scored any championship points. Neither of their drivers has finished in the points. Bottas has retired multiple times through technical problems, most recently in the Netherlands. The commercial item does not mention a word of it. The two stories exist side by side at the same moment, and the gap between them is what deserves dissecting.

Start with the number. In motor racing, points are the measure that does not lie. A driver who finishes in the top ten scores; a driver who retires does not, however fast he was in qualifying. For Cadillac, the consequence is plain: no points for the team, and no points for either driver.

But this is where the puzzle becomes interesting — and where many readers of a commercial item are led astray. When a new team has no points, the instinctive reaction is: their car is poor. That conclusion may be right, but it is not necessarily right. There is another part of the puzzle that the standings do not display: the reliability of the machine. Bottas has retired repeatedly. A car that retires cannot score points, however competitive its single-lap pace may be. In that case, the problem is not in the fundamental design but in operational capability: the engine, the gearbox, the technical systems, the processes on the pit lane and in the garage.

This is a familiar pattern for every rookie team, in every sport, not only Formula 1. A newly promoted football club often plays quite well. They create chances, they defend in an organised way, they run hard. But they lose on small details: a corner left unmarked, a substitution made at the wrong moment, a goal conceded in the 89th minute. Viewers see only the result — a defeat — and conclude the team is weak. Analysts see something else: the gap between process and outcome. With Cadillac we have signals that the process may be better than the result — the team retires, which means sometimes they are in the fight, and then a technical failure pulls them out of it.

One thing must be said clearly: we do not have the data to state with certainty whether those retirements are mechanical faults or design faults. The report does not say. I will not substitute guesswork for data. But the difference between those two possibilities is important enough to decide the entire season. If they are fixable mechanical faults, the issue is time, and points will come. If they are fundamental design faults, the issue is the whole year, and a place at the bottom of the standings becomes permanent.

Now look at the driver pairing. Bottas and Pérez. Do you notice something? Both are at the mature end of their careers. Neither is young. No young driver sits behind them, waiting for a chance. In team-management language, this is called betting on immediate stability: choosing two veterans who know the battlefield, rather than investing in a youngster who needs time. There is a rationale. A rookie team needs voices with weight, needs accurate technical feedback from the person inside the car, needs representation before the media and sponsors. Bottas and Pérez give them all of that.

But the price is also clear. There is no succession pipeline. When both drivers are on the far slope of their careers, the organisation has no Plan B. If one leaves — for results, for age, for pressure — the team must rebuild from scratch in a context in which it has already lost time. And this, I believe, is the most easily overlooked point in the whole Cadillac story. A team with no points is hard enough; a team with no points and no successor is twice as hard.

Then there is the commercial side. I read the report carefully several times. The collection targets the Mexican market. Mexican flag colours. Mexico's national holiday. And the person modelling the shirt is the team's only Mexican driver. This is no coincidence. This is a strategy of market exploitation built around a driver's nationality. Pérez is not being used only as a driver; he is being used as an asset for reaching tens of millions of fans in a country with a passionate racing tradition. In sports economics, this is the basic distinction between sporting value and commercial value. A footballer may score few goals yet sell shirts; a driver may fail to finish yet fill a market segment.

And here is the biggest signal in the whole report: the team has a commercial machine running ahead of its sporting machine. While the car has not finished often enough to score, the commercial arm has signed a deal with a major brand, has launched a product, has chosen the golden window of the Mexican market. This is not to be criticised. It is an inherent feature of every start-up sports organisation: sponsorship money usually arrives before credibility on the track.

You might ask: why does this matter? It matters because it shapes a rookie team's revenue structure. A team with no points receives almost no results-based prize money. Its lifeline comes from two places: the corporate owner, and commercial deals such as this collection. In other words, Cadillac's sporting survival in its debut season depends on General Motors and on contracts like the one with Tommy Hilfiger, not on track performance. That explains how a commercial item can be published during a period of results this poor.

This is where I want to linger, because the common reading of this story can go wrong in two opposite directions.

The first wrong direction: believing the Mexico-flag shirt collection is proof of the team's weakness — that when people are busy selling shirts, the car does not run. That conclusion is too simple. Looking at history, every rookie team — in any sport — must solve the financial problem before the performance problem. No money, no car; no car, no points. The collection is not a substitute for victory; it is the condition for surviving until victory.

The second wrong direction, the opposite one: believing commercial success can cover sporting failure. That conclusion is also wrong, and wrong in a more dangerous way. A team cannot live forever on shirts and logos. When sponsorship money runs too far ahead of results, at some point the sponsor will question the value of the investment. And then the pressure is no longer on the commercial side but pushed down onto the technical side.

The real blind spot lies elsewhere: people read a commercial item as a sporting item. The original report says nothing about speed, about aerodynamic design, about race strategy. It talks about a shirt. But because the shirt is attached to a losing team, readers automatically fold sporting failure into a commercial success story — creating a contradiction the report itself never raised.

I remember a time when a club I was following signed a deal with a major drinks brand in the very week it lost three games in a row. The communications office staged a lovely backdrop, players smiled for photos, the brand rolled out its advertising. But at training the next morning the atmosphere was different. An assistant coach said something to me that I have kept since: shirts sold do not score goals for anyone. He did not say it to disparage commerce. He said it to remind me that those two machines run on different tracks.

There is one more thing I consider easily overlooked. In the photograph, Pérez wears the shirt with the number 11 on his chest. He is a Mexican driver. He is the star of a large market. But he is also a driver who has not scored a single point this season. There is a deeply human tension here: he is elevated as the symbol of a nation, while his results on track do not reflect that symbolic status. For a loyal fan, that is not easy to bear. For a manager, it is a communications problem: how to honour the individual without creating the sense that performance is being replaced by image.

Fans do not need perfect players; they need real people. And what makes a real person on the track is not the number on the chest but the silent finishes, when no camera is pointed at them. That is why I say the rhythm of a game is the only thing that does not know how to pretend. A commercial campaign can be designed in a few weeks. A point-scoring race car can take several seasons. Those two clocks run at different speeds, and when they drift too far apart, insiders feel it before the public notices.

There is one more possibility I want to put on the table, though it is only inference: the Mexico-market collection may be the first trial of a series of products by country, tied to each driver's nationality. If so, the team is building a replicable commercial machine, usable in periods when results have not arrived. Commercially, that is a smart move. Sportingly, it only means something if the track soon gives something back.

So what is the next internal signal to watch? Not the shirt collection. Not the sales figures. But the finishes. For Cadillac, the only meaningful question in the coming months is: can the team fix its reliability? If the car finishes more consistently and a driver breaks into the points for the first time, the whole story flips — the commercial machine that ran ahead will no longer be an off-rhythm mismatch but a springboard. If the retirements continue, the Mexico-flag shirt will read like a promise not kept.

I cover football, and the lesson I carry from the pitch to the track is not a comparison of speed. It is this: keeping the rhythm is not about running fast, but about making sure no one is left behind. For a rookie team, rhythm is the gap between promise and result. Narrow that gap, and even the shirt will become credible. The ball still rolls, the people still stand — and a car still waits for its first finish in the points.