Cadillac Is Going Full Speed Ahead to Shake Up F1

Just over a year after getting approval to join the grid, the sport’s newest team will make its debut this week. And the U.S.-based brand wants to keep the expedited timeline going.

Three hundred and sixty-six days.

That’s the amount of time the Cadillac Formula 1 Team was given between receiving formal approval to become the sport’s 11th constructor in 2026 and lining up a car on the grid for the season’s opening race at the Australian Grand Prix. 

That accelerated timeline and 11th-hour uncertainty has defined the General Motors–backed entry into F1, even though the process began well before Cadillac emerged as the brand that would earn a spot in the highest class of racing. But utilizing that time remains the key for team principal Graeme Lowdon, who has been involved with the project since he took a phone call in his car in the spring of 2022, well over 1,000 days ago. 

Courtesy of Cadillac Formula 1 Team

And every second is still precious.

“Sleep’s an optional extra until Christmas,” Lowdon says ahead of Cadillac’s inaugural season. 

The most important voices that Lowdon heard on the call belonged to former F1 world champion Mario Andretti and his son Michael, co-owner of Andretti Global—the organization bidding to get a spot in the sport. Lowdon was meant to bring his expertise as one of the self-proclaimed “rare animals” who already had gone through the process of launching a new team, with Virgin Racing in 2010. On the call he did exactly that, advising the Andrettis and various investors on how the International Automobile Federation (FIA) process would work and what would need to be done in order to meet the rigorous guidelines.

At the end of the call came a message to Lowdon from Mario, the second and last American to win an F1 driver’s championship, in 1978: “Don’t let me down.”

That would be just the beginning for Lowdon, who came aboard as an adviser. After the initial bid was met with resistance from both F1 and the sport’s 10 established teams, Michael Andretti stepped down from his role at the forefront of the operation in late 2024. The decision cleared the way for General Motors, with its Cadillac brand, to take command of the bid, with TWG Motorsports CEO Dan Towriss at the helm. 

Through it all, Lowdon remained steadfast in his commitment to getting a new team into the sport. After his previous attempt, which ended with Virgin going through numerous rebrands before ending up in severe debt and folding after the 2016 season, the 60-year-old has stayed around F1. “I’d like to think I’ve got the antibodies, in terms of a lot of the things that would normally be a surprise,” he says. 

And on Dec. 5, 2024, Lowdon was given another chance, as the team principal at Cadillac. Ninety-two days later, F1 approved the team’s entry.

Graeme Lowden was hired as Cadillac’s team principal in December 2024, but was involved with getting a new team on the grid more than two years before that. | Kym Illman/Getty Images

“One of the key reasons why we’re here is that the investors had their belief in the project and invested at the right level, which was substantial, I hasten to add, with no guarantee of an entry,” Lowdon says.

From there, Cadillac’s official countdown clock began. But the work was already well underway.

F1 is no stranger to fluctuations in the number of teams that enter each season, with as many as 12 outfits competing as recently as 2012. But the grid has been rather stable for the past decade, with 10 constructors comprising the field since ’17. There’s no how-to manual for where a new team should begin.

“You can download all of the regulations off the internet, but there’s nothing that indicates, How do you enter as a new team?” Lowdon says.

So Cadillac focused its efforts on a logical place to start: people. Lowdon and Towriss received 143,265 applications from those eager to get involved in building an F1 team from scratch. Cadillac short-listed 9,051 candidates and interviewed “somewhere in the region of 6,500,” Lowdon says. At the end of 2025, the staff hovered at about 525 full-time employees, with a number of contractors and partners spread across three primary locations: the team’s satellite facility in Silverstone, U.K., as well as U.S. hubs in Fishers, Ind., and Charlotte.

Of course, the team’s most forward-facing employees will be behind the wheel. And Cadillac made sure to go after figures who would be familiar to F1 fans of the past decade: Valtteri Bottas and Sergio “Checo” Pérez. The two veterans bring a wealth of experience to the team, with a combined 26 years on the F1 circuit, 106 podium finishes and 16 race wins. Waiting in the wings is reserve driver Zhou Guanyu, who raced for three seasons alongside Bottas at Alfa Romeo and Sauber. His manager at the time? Lowdon. 

“I feel like it’s always a very special moment when you’re with a team from the very beginning,” says Zhou, who was born in Shanghai and moved to England when he was 12. “So you’re building up together, the whole team, and in F1, performing together, which is very exciting.”

While this may be the beginning for Cadillac, it’s far from it for most involved. The Finnish-born Bottas ran as the No. 2 driver to seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton while at Mercedes until 2022, when he moved to Alfa Romeo (which later operated as Sauber). But he did not score a single point any of the 24 races in ’24 and went back to Mercedes last season as a reserve driver. Pérez, the first Mexican driver to win a race in 50 years, similarly sat behind four-time champion Max Verstappen at Red Bull, supporting the team’s constructors’ championships in ’22 and ’23. After a difficult ’24 season, however, Pérez was left without an opportunity to drive. Zhou served as the reserve driver at Ferrari last season following a similarly difficult tenure at Sauber. All three drivers had spent time with F1’s elite, and yet going into 2026, were without a secure spot in the sport.

Veterans Sergio Pérez (left) and Valtteri Bottas bring a wealth of experience to F1s newest team. | Courtesy of Cadillac Formula 1 Team

There was speculation that Cadillac would sign an American driver in an effort to appeal to fans looking to get behind the new team. IndyCar star Colton Herta did make the leap to become the team’s test driver and race in Formula 2 with Cadillac’s support, but he will still need significant time before he is ready to sit in one of the 22 most coveted seats in racing. There was little doubt in Lowdon’s mind about the choices of Bottas and Pérez, and once the team got the first glimpse of its car at preseason testing in Barcelona, he was “completely convinced.”

“Halfway through the Barcelona test, I was sat on the pit wall listening to comments that won’t mean an awful lot to anybody listening in, but meant a lot to me, because there were the kind of comments that come from highly experienced drivers,” Lowdon says. “They have a level of maturity, both when they’re talking in technical terms, and also the way that they are prioritizing feedback, it’s very clear that they have a lot of experience. And also the way that they are motivating and encouraging the teammates around them.”

Though there may not be an American behind the wheel, the red, white and blue clearly runs deep in the DNA of what Cadillac is trying to achieve off the track. Marketing efforts have directly targeted a U.S. audience, following the sport’s boom in the country since the start of the decade.

Those efforts culminated in a 30-second advertisement that aired during Super Bowl LX—another endeavor that came under a time crunch. Chief marketing officer Ahmed Iqbal says the spot, which unveiled Cadillac’s inaugural livery, came together in less than 90 days. The ad connected to an in-person activation in the middle of Times Square in New York City, again in an attempt to emphasize the American roots of the team.

Most notably, though, the Super Bowl clip featured a snippet of John F. Kennedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the moon” speech, invoking the Apollo missions, which the Cadillac operation seems to feel a certain kinship with. Iqbal calls the effort behind the ad, as well as the entire team, “a moonshot” driven by “American ingenuity and audacious ambition.”

“We’re trying to do something, not first, but we’re trying to do it fast and we’re trying to do it the best,” Iqbal says. “It’s one of those iconic American moments that I think got everyone together in this country to be like, ‘Yeah, this is worth doing, it’s worth going, it’s worth trying to innovate and do this crazy thing that many think is not possible.’ ”

Fielding an F1 team certainly doesn’t require the same calculations or logistics as landing an astronaut on the moon, but the collaborative effort across time zones and oceans has been immense. It’s part of what Lowdon calls the “leap into the unknown” that Cadillac has taken. Yet the experience that comes from the staff surrounding the drivers helps limit the question marks. 

Chief technical officer Nick Chester held a similar role at Renault. Former Alpine operations director Robert White is the team’s chief operating officer. Consultant Pat Symonds was the chief technical officer at F1 from 2017 to ’24 with stops at Renault, Marussia and Williams (again, a Lowdon connection) also on his résumé.

Cadillac unveiled its first F1 car in a Super Bowl commercial. | Courtesy of Cadillac Formula 1 Team

“We don’t just have everyone starting from scratch,” Zhou says. “We have experienced people, experienced knowledge, experienced engineers, which makes the difference because F1 is so complicated. You need to get everything right as a team. And that takes time.”

Time. Something that Cadillac has been short on for the past year. And yet, two cars will pull out of the garage and onto the tracks at 24 different Grands Prix in 2026. When they do, there’s no telling exactly how they’ll fare. As is customary every few seasons in the sport, the FIA introduced new technical regulations this winter that will reset the competitive balance of the field. There’s no guarantee that McLaren, which dominated last season en route to Lando Norris’s first world championship, will be atop the pecking order again. 

For Cadillac, competing with recent powerhouses like Red Bull or Mercedes, or historic operations like Ferrari and McLaren, seems like an uphill battle. F1 isn’t a sport where teams can inhibit the opposition, but rather “control the things that are within our scope and within our ability,” Lowdon says.  

Yet there’s a new-kid-on-the-block sort of attitude within Cadillac. Hungry, and with an upstart mentality, those within the building have aspirations of shaking up the sport. To put it plainly, Cadillac F1 has nothing to lose. 

“I think the best way to think of it is actually to put ourselves in the shoes of the opposition,” Lowdon says. “There’s not a team on that grid that hasn’t been doing this for at least a decade, if not decades, and I’m pretty sure their shareholders would be somewhat upset if we just turn up and start beating their team. In fact, they may be more than upset, they would be apoplectic.”

Cadillac’s time to prove itself has been rapidly approaching and now that it’s here, there’s clearly no signs of slowing down.  

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