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As inescapable as it is inexorable, everyone at Cadillac is aware the clock is ticking as they edge closer towards a moment of truth well over three years in the making. The expectation and anticipation for when the team, backed by US manufacturer General Motors, hits the grid as Formula One’s 11th entry for the first race of 2026 is ratcheting up with every passing second.
Appropriately for this all-American marque, the team are launching their F1 entry on Saturday night with a red-carpet event at Miami beach after the sprint race and qualifying have concluded at the Hard Rock Stadium circuit.
Backed by GM and the TWG Motorsports group, their effort is a full-on start-up, rather than the more well-trodden route of simply buying an existing team, with all the expense and resources that entails, and its perils and pitfalls. At the helm almost since its inception has been Graeme Lowdon, one of the very few F1 personnel who can lay claim to having already done it once before and who knows how quickly the time will go between now and lights out in Australia next year.
“We have on all of our facilities, on the wall of every office, a countdown clock which is showing the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds to the start of our first grand prix,” he says. “We don’t want to be in a position where there’s some mad panic at the end.”
Lowdon is Cadillac’s British team principal and the 60-year-old has been here before, albeit in altogether different circumstances. He was integral to the Manor F1 team for their entry in 2010, a task he describes as starting in an empty room, with a screwdriver and an A4 sheet of paper and ending up seven months later on the grid.
Cadillac’s road to F1 has enjoyed a significantly longer gestation but did have similarly humble beginnings, when in August 2022 Lowdon and two others were asked to begin planning what would ultimately develop into the GM works-backed team.
The initial phase involved small steps without any certainty of an entry, the process grinding slowly through the FIA and F1. Yet the team had to be constructed because starting cold if and when entry was granted would have made the task all but impossible. Lowdon had to recruit without using the phrase “Formula One team” with euphemisms such as “top tier motorsport opportunity”.
Nonetheless the process went on and when GM came on board and committed to building its own engine for 2029 it was a game-changer. At the Las Vegas GP in November last year the Cadillac entry, using Ferrari engines until 2029, was agreed.
The expansion since has been exponential. They are recruiting currently, on average, one person a day and in the process of completing a new headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis. It will sit alongside their facilities already in operation at Silverstone – the European hub – and the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are also building the facility to manufacture the new engine.
Lowdon, however, has stressed the importance of people and here many of the key roles have been filled as the project progressed. The chief designer is Lowdon’s former colleague from Manor, John McQuilliam, and the head of aerodynamics Jon Tomlinson, from Williams. Nick Chester, formerly of Renault is the technical director, Peter Crolla is on board as team manager from Haas and Pat Symonds, of Benetton, Renault and Williams, is an engineering consultant.
Assembling them and a host of other personnel was indicative of how seriously the project was being taken, believes Lowdon. “It’s a huge, huge, huge testament to the owners,” he says. “Throughout that whole time we were building a Formula One team but without certainty of an entry and that’s a commitment.”
Even with the recruitment drive the quest to get up to speed is going to be enormously hard, although Lowdon is calm and believes they are on target to do so. Nonetheless they have still to reach the first hurdle of completing the build and fire-up of the car – there is a countdown clock for that too. A functioning race team must be honed for competition and then what seems almost a bagatelle in comparison but which will attract the greatest attention, the task of hiring the drivers.
The team will not discuss names of whom they are engaging in talks with but there is naturally some expectation that such a proud American brand will want an American driver in a seat. It was the original Andretti-Cadillac team’s attempted entry into F1 which transformed into the GM-backed Cadillac works entry. Mario Andretti remains an adviser and Andretti’s American IndyCar ace Colton Herta is considered a likely candidate, alongside the experienced Sergio Pérez who is believed to be being actively pursued. Lowdon simply insists the decision will be made on merit but notes US drivers are in that mix.
The importance for F1 of having a US manufacturer, then, cannot be played down. F1 already has one American team in Haas but this is a different ballgame. It’s an American team backed by a global manufacturer, with a long history in motorsport. Their entry is indicative of the weight they attach to F1 in selling their brand across the world and of the increasing significance of the sport in the US, which as Lowdon notes has the potential to create an “enormous” fanbase.
Which, for the moment, remains the stuff of ambitious intent in the boardrooms and perhaps the daydreams of fleeting moments for those at the sharp end of making it happen and for whom the clock never stops.
“It’s a really, really big task,” acknowledges Lowdon. “The first race of next year we need to be on the grid. We can’t turn up a week later and just say: ‘Everyone else had the race last week, we’ll have it this week.’ That just won’t wash.”
