Former Charles Leclerc race engineer secures new role with Cadillac F1 team
Xavier Marcos Padros served as Charles Leclerc's Ferrari race engineer between 2019 and 2024
Xavier Marcos Padros, Charles Leclerc’s former race engineer at Ferrari, has landed the role of chief race engineer of the Cadillac F1 team.
It comes after PlanetF1.com exclusively revealed the identities of the race engineers for Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez ahead of the F1 2026 season.
Former Charles Leclerc race engineer joins Cadillac F1 team
After spells with HRT and Williams, where he worked as former Ferrari driver Felipe Massa’s performance engineer, Marcos Padros returned to Formula 1 with Ferrari in 2018, becoming Leclerc’s race engineer ahead of the 2019 season.
The pair established an effective partnership with Leclerc claiming a total of five grand prix wins with Marcos Padros by his side.
Marcos Padros was moved to “other important company programmes” by Ferrari in the aftermath of the 2024 Miami Grand Prix, with Bryan Bozzi becoming Leclerc’s new race engineer from that year’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola.
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Leclerc and Bozzi took just two races to prove a winning partnership, with the Ferrari man taking an emotional home victory in Monaco.
He added two further victories in 2024 at Monza and Austin before Ferrari suffered a winless 2025 campaign.
It emerged in January that Marcos Padros had joined Cadillac as the technical director of its LMDh sportscar project, working in the World Endurance Championship and the United States-based IMSA series.
The Cadillac F1 team has confirmed to PlanetF1.com that Marcos Padros is now working with the manufacturer’s F1 team ahead of its debut season in F1 2026.
Marcos Padros is understood to have been among the Cadillac F1 team members on site when Perez took to the wheel of an all-black 2023 Ferrari F1 car at Imola last month.
The outing represented the team’s first real-life test session with an F1 car ahead of its debut season, having simulated a number of race weekends in 2025 to aid its preparations.
The confirmation of Marcos Padros’s new role comes after PlanetF1.com exclusively revealed on Saturday that the team’s race engineers for the F1 2026 season have been decided.
Former Aston Martin performance engineer Carlo Pasetti will act as Perez’s race engineer, with ex-Alpine man John Howard set to be the voice in Bottas’s ear.
Howard previously served as Pierre Gasly’s race engineer at Alpine, where he spent almost 15 years before leaving in April 2025.
Additional reporting by Mat Coch
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