Cadillac builds its F1 dream with inspiration from NASA

The race has already started for Cadillac as it prepares to enter Formula 1 for 2026. 

Starting from scratch, to design, build and test its F1 car before heading to Australia for the season-opening race is made even more pressing by the short timeline. Cadillac has had a little over 11 months when it received confirmation that its application to join the series was finally approved after the initial request was denied.

The team’s arrival is special. Not least because it represents another squad on the grid, but unlike the other 10, it will have its base primarily in the United States in a sprawling purpose-built facility in Fishers, Indianapolis.

Although the foundations are laid in that project, there are some metaphorical stones being placed in a series of identical warehouses opposite Silverstone Circuit.

And the production of the first Cadillac grand prix cars is currently in the process of being designed and built by a team of nearly 600 staff – having started with a small group of three.

One of those was Graeme Lowdon, former boss of the Marussia F1 team, who showed Autosport around the sites in Silverstone.

“Based on the current calendar, that actually gives us one day less than a year to be in free practice. And as you’ve probably seen walking around, there’s a lot to do,” he said, while witnessing the delivery of new equipment, much still in its packaging as this fledgling operation takes shape.

“This is an American team. Our head office is in Fishers, Indianapolis. What you’ve seen here in Silverstone is kind of the nuts and bolts of what you need to do to get on the grid. 

“But there is a whole other dimension to the team that we’re obviously excited to tell you about at the right time in the US.

“The biggest challenge in building any team or the most important element of any team, of course, is the people. I mentioned before we’re 109 days into this process. We’ve got another 250 something to the first race. So we’re around about a third of the way through already. Yet we’ve got around about 67 percent of the team members in place. 

“So in terms of the number of people to actually go racing with a team like that, you need around about 600 people by the time you go to the first race. We’re currently around about two-thirds of the way there, which probably means we’re not the smallest team on the F1 grid at the minute.”

The site at Silverstone – grey buildings housing a variety of departments for the fledgling team – will form a hub, but the main focus will be in Fishers which will become Cadillac’s long-term home for its F1 operation. It will also see American staff recruited to build its F1 cars in Indianapolis, as Lowdon explains.

“We’re in six buildings here that will eventually condense to four buildings and really three prime ones,” he said. “The UK Technical Centre, the UK Production Centre, and the UK Logistics Centre. They’re the three key buildings here, and there’ll be a small machine shop as well. We’ve already issued somewhere in the region of 6,000 drawings and made 10,000 components already.

Cadillac F1 Team works shop

Photo by: Cadillac Communications

“Fishers will be our manufacturing site over time, but it takes a long time to do that. We have to build the building, we have to put the machines in, we have to hire the people, we have to train the people.

“So we rely heavily on third-party suppliers. And to give you an idea, this week we onboarded 30 new suppliers and that’s the kind of cadence that’s needed. It’s a huge task in just supplier management. And then we’re looking over time to internalise a lot of that manufacturing.

“On the IT side, we’ve issued 425 laptops. That might sound really insignificant, but an established team will just do refreshes. When you’re doing that kind of volume in one hit, it’s very impressive to see some of this happen.

“And in IT alone, they’ve issued 6,000 purchase orders, just from the IT department. And they’re currently storing 5 petabytes of CFD data, which is 5,000 million million bits of information on the CFD side.

“You have to remember they’re storing that in infrastructure that didn’t exist, so you have to build that. And it’s done by people who weren’t here, because we’ve had to hire them as well.”

With the US and UK operation, and provision for Cadillac to supply its own General Motors-produced power unit from sites in Michigan and Charlotte, Lowdon revealed that the team’s management structure needs to be workable to accumulate so many different parts of the business. 

Cadillac F1 Team works shop

Photo by: Cadillac Communications

He added that Cadillac is using a technique used by NASA when it conducted its Apollo missions to the moon.

“I could bore you silly about the management structure that we’ve come up with,” he said with a laugh.

“If you look at the task in hand, we’ve got immovable deadlines. We’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction. So we need engineers talking to engineers. So we need an engineer here talking to an engineer in Charlotte and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers. And so we’ve looked to have a very, very flat management structure.

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project. It’s very similar. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes!

“Race teams are often described in military terms; someone will say, this is organised in a kind of pyramid, and you have one person at the top. And the typical military structure is command and control. So you issue commands, people do things.

“When it’s a multi-site like this, that becomes a massive challenge. And what you can’t have is an engineer here having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just a different geographic location, but a different country altogether, and then go up and down. So instead, it’s a kind of a different structure where it’s mission control instead of command and control.”

Graeme Lowdon, Cadillac F1 team principal

Photo by: Cadillac Communications

By structuring most of the operation in the US, Lowdon is convinced it could offer Cadillac a competitive advantage.

It will hold on to its Silverstone facility for at least 10 years, which will attract experienced F1 staff from the traditional Motorsport Valley in the UK. But it will also allow Cadillac to appeal to a growing popularity in the US, not just in terms of fan base, but also in employment skill sets.

“We’re going to recruit US staff,” Lowdon said. “Some of them may come here for training on certain things. But I think there is this perception that Formula 1 can only take place in the UK or Europe.

“But I keep thinking, ‘well, there’s a lot of really super-advanced engineering that goes on in the US; they literally put a man on the moon’.

“We found in the projects that we’ve been doing with GM already, the calibre and the standard of engineering is super, super high. 

“There are different laws and it’s a really, really, really big task setting these businesses up. But in terms of attracting and sourcing good people, there’s absolutely zero doubt in my mind. And actually, I think it’s a competitive advantage.”

Graeme Lowdon, Cadillac F1 team principal

Photo by: Cadillac Communications

One of the questions asked about Cadillac’s entrance to F1 was what the brand can bring to the championship. GM’s flagship brand holds a small market share in Europe, but Lowdon does not expect that to be a problem as the project also features the support of sports franchise giant, TWG.

“I think we offer a number of things,” Lowdon added. “The fact that we are backed by GM is super important because they have the scale. I think the fact that we have TWG there is super important as well because people can see that we have investors who really understand sport.

“If we look at the team element, we’ve got a lot of experienced people here. And the thing that we can offer them is certainly this flat structure. We can offer a lot of responsibility. 

“When that car turns a wheel for the first time, everyone in here will be able to point at it and say, ‘I did that.’”

One area which remains unknown, however, is the team’s driver lineup. Cadillac has been heavily linked with 10-time grand prix winner and current Mercedes reserve Valtteri Bottas, while Sergio Perez, who left F1 at the end of 2024, is also in the pipeline. 

Lowdon, however, is staying tight-lipped on his choices but revealed having experience would help the team.

Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

“A good comment from someone walking around when they saw all the stuff that was going on was, ‘you know, I can see why the drivers aren’t the number one thing on the list’ – nothing’s decided yet,” said Lowdon.

“Yes, we know who’s in the market, we’ve got a good idea of what we need, but we’re still some way off reaching that stage. I think there’s a very strong argument to say that a new team in its first year of racing would benefit hugely from people who are experienced in Formula 1.”

It’s early days, and there is still plenty of work to do, but if Lowdon is indeed right, and that NASA is being cited as a business model, then there really is no reason why Cadillac should not be shooting for the moon.