The Team That Chose to Lose First

THE BIG WHY — Follow the S-Curve series

Follow the S-Curve: The Team That Chose to Lose First

THE BIG WHY — Follow the S-Curve series

I once sat in a review where a twenty-nine-year-old with eighteen months on the program outscored me on every metric the room cared about. Faster turnaround. Cleaner slides. A confident answer for every question, including the ones he didn’t actually know the answer to yet. I had thirty-two years of aviation R&D across two companies sitting behind my eyes, and none of it showed up on the scorecard that day.

That’s the moment this article is really about. Not Formula One. Not Cadillac. Us — the engineers who are good at things that don’t compress into a quarterly metric.

The Confession

Here’s the correction I have to make on myself before I make it on anyone else: for most of my career, I believed the scoreboard was the truth. If the standings said I was losing, I assumed I was losing. It took watching a Formula One team do something deliberately strange to see the flaw in that belief.

Cadillac entered the 2026 F1 season and has spent it in last place. Slow lap times, an empty points column, the predictable pile-on across social media. The easy read is failure. The forensic read — the one that actually holds up when you pull the telemetry apart — is a team that appears to have budgeted for exactly this outcome, on purpose, as the first stage of a longer plan.

The GM engine that will actually make Cadillac competitive doesn’t arrive until 2029. That date is fixed. It is not negotiable, not with effort, not with money, not with a better driver lineup. Which means the real engineering decision Cadillac faced wasn’t “how do we go faster this year” — that question was unsolvable by design. The real question was: what do we do with three years we’re forced to wait?

That reframe is the whole article. Everything else is teardown.

The Technical Teardown

TRIZ — the systematic innovation discipline I’ve relied on for twenty years — has a concept called the S-curve: every technical system moves through infancy, rapid growth, maturity, and decline, and the shape of that curve is often set by a limiting sub-system long before the rest of the system catches up. You don’t get to skip infancy by wanting to. You get to choose what you do during infancy.

Cadillac’s infancy is 2026 through 2028. The limiting sub-system is the engine — literally not yet built. Everything else on the car, the team, and the organization is free to develop on its own curve, independent of that constraint. That’s the engineering insight worth stealing: when your primary system is locked by someone else’s timeline, you don’t wait — you develop every sub-system that isn’t locked.

Look at what that actually means in practice, because this is where it stops being a metaphor and starts being a checklist:

(a) Data accumulation as a deliberate asset, not a byproduct. Every session in 2026, 2027, and 2028 generates telemetry, tire behavior, strategy calls, pit stop timing — a dataset most new teams don’t get until they’re already competitive, because most new teams arrive competitive or don’t survive long enough to matter. Cadillac gets three full seasons of “how Formula One actually behaves” before they’re under pressure to convert it into points.

(b) Personnel choices that signal the real plan. Bottas and Perez are not development drivers chasing their first contract. They are experienced heads brought in specifically to give precise, structured feedback under duress — the kind of feedback a nineteen-year-old prospect can’t yet articulate, because he hasn’t crashed enough times to know what he’s feeling. That hiring pattern is a tell. You don’t recruit veteran feedback-givers if the plan is only “survive.”

(c) Institutional knowledge as the actual product. Debrief notes, procedures, the accumulated judgment of “we tried that, it didn’t work, here’s why” — none of it shows up in the standings. All of it compounds. By 2029, when the competitive engine finally lands, it drops into an organization that already knows how to be a Formula One team. That is a categorically different starting position than a brand-new outfit trying to learn the sport and race a new engine in the same season.

(d) The willingness to be misjudged. This is the part that costs the most and pays the least visibly. Every front-running team, every commentator, every social media pile-on is scoring Cadillac against the wrong clock. Cadillac appears to be letting them. That’s not humility — it’s discipline. Correcting the record costs attention and energy that’s better spent on the actual work.

Now hold that up against a mid-career or late-career engineer, because the pattern doesn’t change — only the units do.

Mid-career, the visible clock is promotion cycles, headcount, title. If you’re not winning on that clock — passed over, reorg’d, sitting on a team nobody’s watching — the Cadillac move is to ask what your engine-arrives-in-2029 equivalent is. Usually it’s judgment that doesn’t show up on a scorecard: which failure modes actually kill a program versus which ones just look scary, which people to trust when the room is under pressure, how the organization really makes decisions versus what the org chart claims. That’s the Bottas-and-Perez move — become the person who gives precise feedback under duress, not the person chasing the fastest visible win this quarter.

But here’s the honest test, and I mean this as a correction I make on myself as much as anyone: are you actually accumulating transferable judgment, or are you telling yourself a “long game” story to excuse being stuck? Write down, concretely, what you know now that you didn’t know two years ago that someone would pay for. If you can’t fill that in, you’re not building the engine. You’re just losing quietly, and calling it strategy doesn’t make it one.

Late-career, the clock inverts entirely. You’re not waiting for your engine to arrive — you already have three decades of telemetry sitting in your head. The Cadillac question becomes: what happens to that dataset when you leave the building? This is not a retirement question. It’s an engineering question, and it has the same answer it always has: capture the procedure, not the nostalgia. Recorded expert interviews tied to specific repair procedures. A published methodology. A curriculum that lets a two-year engineer perform what took you twenty years to earn. That’s structurally identical to what Cadillac is doing right now — banking three seasons of data before the engine shows up. You’re banking three decades of data before you walk out the door.

The Forensic Signature

The tell that separates a real S-curve strategy from a convenient excuse is always the same: falsifiability. A team — or an engineer — playing the long game leaves evidence now, not just a story later. Cadillac’s evidence is the driver lineup and, we’ll find out, the facility investment and hiring pattern over these three years. An engineer’s evidence is the notebook, the written failure analysis, the documented judgment that didn’t exist two years ago.

If that evidence isn’t there, the “we’re building for the long term” story is just the standard excuse every backmarker gives. The engineering bet and the narrative bet are the same bet. That’s the part people skip because it’s uncomfortable, and it’s exactly the part worth sitting with.

The Aftermath — and the Forward Prediction

The 2026 standings will show Cadillac at the bottom. Formula One has a long memory, though — it remembers the teams that absorbed early humiliation and used it as information, the ones playing a game the rest of the paddock wasn’t watching. Maybe Cadillac was never racing Ferrari in 2026. Maybe they were racing the calendar. If the foundation holds and the engine arrives on schedule, 2026 won’t be remembered as the year Cadillac finished last. It’ll be remembered as the year they started.

The TRIZ prediction, stated plainly: systems that are locked by a sub-system on someone else’s timeline don’t get faster by protesting the lock. They get faster by developing every other sub-system while they wait — and the organizations, and the engineers, that understand this arrive at the inflection point already built for it, while everyone who spent the waiting years defending their position on last year’s scoreboard arrives with nothing but the scoreboard.

We are, most of us, running some version of Cadillac’s 2026 season right now — in a role, in a career stage, in a body of knowledge nobody’s asked us to hand over yet. The standings will say what they say. The question worth asking, the one nobody thought to ask about Cadillac either, is what you’re quietly building while everyone’s watching the wrong number.

Thank you for reading this one. If it named something you’re already doing without a word for it, that’s the point of the series.

— Herbert Roberts, P.E.