Marcin Budkowski's first appearance as Cadillac team principal was supposed to be about him. Instead the room wanted to know about a 21-year-old Brazilian in Formula 2.
Motorsport reported during the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend that Cadillac was tracking Rafael Camara, a Ferrari Driver Academy member, for one of its 2027 race seats. The logic is not hard to follow: Cadillac runs Ferrari power, and Camara has been the fastest thing in F2 lately, taking four poles from the last six rounds. He is third in the championship, 22 points adrift of Nikola Tsolov.
CEO Dan Towriss gave an answer with two halves that pull against each other.
"It's a great question, whether a younger driver [can] come in and push the team. It's certainly something that we think about," he said. "We've got two experienced drivers that we're very happy with, that are pushing the team, and we'll continue to push them."
On the specific reports: "I know there's been some of the rumours out there with some of the young drivers. They're not substantiated, so that's not something I would focus on. We're not focused on that at the moment."
Then the qualifier. "I'll throw the caveat, though. It's Formula 1, and things can always change. There are no changes planned at the moment for '27, but things can always change."
Someone would have to lose a seat. Sergio Perez or Valtteri Bottas - and Bottas has been the slower of the pair over the opening 11 rounds. Budkowski, asked whether hiring a Ferrari junior might strengthen the team's link to its engine supplier, avoided the question and spoke about the powertrain instead.
Camara has been asked the same thing from a different angle, with the rumour mill at that point putting him at Haas for 2027 rather than Cadillac. His answer to F2 was politely non-committal.
"It's good to see," he said. "You don't really know at the moment, but it's nice to have this, and to see that the dream is close. But at the same time, you don't want to get too much into that because I'm still in a very important championship, and if you do well, most likely you're going to get a chance."
He would rather talk about the season he is actually in: "Not many people get this opportunity, especially being in a team that's one of the best in Formula 2 and having the chance to fight for the championship."
The Haas theory runs on the same fuel as the Cadillac one - Ferrari engines, Ferrari juniors, and an Esteban Ocon seat that nobody treats as locked.
Camara is one of three F2 names tangled in the 2027 market. Tsolov, the points leader and a Red Bull junior, has been linked to Liam Lawson's Racing Bulls drive. Team boss Alan Permane called that "just rumours" while acknowledging Tsolov is on the radar; the Bulgarian told Sky F1 that nothing concrete has begun, adding: "I have no doubt that if everything goes the same way, I surely would get an opportunity one day."
Colton Herta is the third. He gave up IndyCar for a Cadillac test contract and a Hitech F2 seat that has not delivered, and he now risks ending the year one point short of Super Licence eligibility with no F2 points in sight. Four FP1 runs with Cadillac are scheduled. Asked by PlanetF1 about 2027, Herta said he and the team "haven't talked about next year yet."
Bottas, meanwhile, insists to PlanetF1 and others that he is not part of silly season at all.
Juan Pablo Montoya, talking about Ferrari's own junior queue, described the mechanism that governs all of this: "If Camara were to join Formula 1 and they thought Camara was cooler, then Bearman wouldn't come back."
No vacancy has been confirmed anywhere. Towriss's caveat remains the only line in Cadillac's denial that leaves room for one.