Valtteri Bottas sat on a plastic bag inside the Cadillac Formula 1 chassis while a technician poured liquid compound around his body. The foam hardened into a mold of the Finnish driver’s frame, and from that crude beginning, one of the most precisely fitted components in motorsport took shape.
The process, documented in the latest episode of Cadillac’s “What Makes Fast” series, reveals something more interesting than the typical PR content cycle. The team isn’t building its seats from carbon fiber, the default material in F1 for decades. Instead, the Cadillac F1 Team uses a natural flax-based fiber weave.
The reasoning is practical, not just environmental. Flax fiber isolates the driver from vibration better than carbon fiber does. In a car that shakes its occupant for nearly two hours at forces exceeding 5G in braking zones, that difference matters in the muscles, the focus, and the lap times late in a stint.
Coordination runs through GM’s Charlotte Technical Center, but the seat itself gets built at the team’s U.K. facility near Silverstone. The foam mold is digitally scanned and measured to create a precise 3D model, and the physical seat is laid up from there.
Then comes the fitting. Bottas climbed into the bespoke seat in the garage at the British Grand Prix and gave the team real-time feedback on pressure points and gaps. Too loose and the driver slides under braking, burning energy just staying in position. Too tight and circulation gets restricted, pain builds, reaction times degrade.
The team pulled the seat back to the factory, shaved material in some spots, added it in others, and returned a revised version. Bottas used it immediately in Free Practice 1 that same weekend.
What strikes you about this process is how handmade it remains. Formula 1 teams spend hundreds of millions on computational fluid dynamics, wind tunnel hours, and simulation rigs. The seat still starts with a guy sitting on a bag while someone pours goo around him.
It also signals where Cadillac’s F1 operation is placing its early bets. This is a team that only joined the grid in 2026, the first new American constructor entry in decades. They don’t have the institutional knowledge that Mercedes, Ferrari, or Red Bull have accumulated over years of iterating on every component.
Choosing flax over carbon fiber for the seat is a small decision in isolation, but it shows a willingness to deviate from convention when the data supports it. The flax weave is lighter on sustainability metrics too, though the team frames the choice primarily around performance. In F1, nobody cares why you’re faster as long as you are.
Bottas, who has 10 Grand Prix victories and years of experience at Mercedes and Alfa Romeo, knows what a proper seat feels like. His willingness to validate the flax construction publicly suggests it works.
The bigger question is whether these kinds of marginal, unconventional choices can accumulate into something competitive for a team still finding its footing against operations that have been refining their methods for a generation. Cadillac is building from scratch, one foam mold at a time.
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