When Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez head out onto Melbourne’s Albert Park circuit for the Australian Grand Prix on March 8, it will be exactly one year and a day since Cadillac finally gained formal approval from Formula 1 to join the grid at the pinnacle of motor sport.

That long and convoluted process, which reached fruition on March 7, 2025, has been well documented. The apparent obstacles caused anger and dismay in some quarters, and even an antitrust investigation in the US, but all the while work was ongoing to set up the operation and recruit the staff required. On the eve of Cadillac’s debut, team principal Graeme Lowdon is philosophical about what might be construed as an ordeal. “The evaluation process itself was incredibly thorough, and rightly so,” he reflects.

Lowdon, of course, has history in F1. He was a big player in a previous F1 start-up: the Manor team that joined the grid as Virgin in 2010. Since he and Manor founder John Booth siphoned themselves away from that squad at the end of 2015, they spent a couple of years competing in the World Endurance Championship, while Lowdon did “a lot of consulting for either Formula 1 teams or people who were buying or selling Formula 1 teams, or putting them into administration. I got heavily involved in a whole bunch of transactions, including the Force India to Racing Point to what is now Aston Martin, and I was the sole F1 adviser for Dorilton on their acquisition of Williams.”

As a result of this work, he was cold-called on behalf of the Andretti family who were initially fronting what became the Cadillac F1 project. “I understood the process and had a good idea of what was important,” explains Lowdon of how he was taken on board, “and part of the advice was that it helps enormously if you actually just start building the team, for two reasons. One: there’s a big mismatch between the timeline for an entry process, and what you actually need to do. If you wait until you get an entry, it’s almost impossible to be on the grid. Secondly, the more you do, the more you invest, the more seriously people are going to take the proposition, and also the less risk there is for those that need to make a decision about whether such a team should be allowed an entry or not. You’re showing in concrete terms that you have the capability to go ahead and build a complete F1 team.

“Previous FIA entry processes had lasted on average about 17 or 18 weeks, and this one we were a good couple of years into it before the entry was approved. I never doubted that the proposition would get an entry because it was just so compelling. I just could not see any way that any sane decision would go against it. But it’s one thing knowing something would get accepted; it’s another knowing how long it would take.”

It wasn’t until after an agreement in principle had been reached with F1, in November 2024, that Lowdon was named publicly as Cadillac’s team principal. But he had already been given this title on the original submission approved by the FIA in 2023. “As a team that’s in the process we couldn’t talk externally at all,” he recalls. “That was part of the condition.”

They couldn’t talk, but they were busy hiring. One of the early big names to arrive, during that limbo between FIA approval and F1 finally giving the green light, was Pat Symonds. Poaching F1’s own chief technical officer at the height of a stand-off with that organisation may not have gone down too well, and Symonds, who takes the role of executive engineering director, is joined by fellow Renault/Alpine alumni Nick Chester and Rob White.

Of Symonds, who had a spell with the Manor F1 team, Lowdon laughs: “He was actually one of the people that we had to submit our proposal to, so I’d like to think that he took one look at it and thought, ‘Blimey, these guys know what they’re doing,’ so it made it a much easier conversation when I had a chat with him! I think Pat’s on record saying that in his heart of hearts he enjoys being on the competitive side of the sport.

“Nick is our technical director and Rob is our chief operating officer, and both have got massive tasks. A few years ago there were five of us in an office in Banbury and a couple of sheets of A4 paper and not even a screwdriver. Rob’s doing an amazing job because we’re building factories, we’re not just building race cars, and on the operations side he’s responsible for the racing car and also the factories in which the cars are being built and will be built in the future, and that’s on both sides of the Atlantic.”

This has, indeed, been an enormous undertaking, with construction of the new Cadillac F1 facility at Silverstone, work carried out at the General Motors facility in Charlotte and Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne, and a new US base at Fishers, Indiana in build. All while putting together a team of 600 people.

“There wasn’t time to talk about everything for weeks on end”

Key to the last of those tasks has been the recruitment of former Haas team manager Peter Crolla, who is taking on the same role at Cadillac, joking that he’s the go-to man “for American-owned Formula 1 start-ups!” Crolla was initially approached by Marc Hynes, Lowdon’s partner in their Equals Management company (which looks after Cadillac reserve Zhou Guanyu), and started work in April 2025.

“One thing I was quite keen to firm up with Graeme during our early discussions was that time is going to be absolutely critical, and we need a minimum of nine months to build an operational team, which we have,” relates Crolla. “But still everything needs to be really fast moving, so that agility of decision-making and not needing a board meeting to decide on the size and shape and colour of everything we’re going to do was super-critical.

“I’d say we’re in a good place because the business has afforded us all that ability to make decisions quickly, the financial resources are without question. We’re all here because we know what we’re doing and we know what a good team looks like and operates like. But we were really left to that because there wasn’t time to talk about everything for days and weeks on end.”

Crolla’s responsibilities have lain mostly in pulling together the race team mechanics and garage technicians, together with the travel department. “We were quite aggressive I would say in terms of how we approached recruitment, because we know that there isn’t an abundance of staff that you want on board when you’re setting up a team like this,” he explains. “You want to be picking and choosing the best possible line-up for an organisation, not taking just what’s available.”

Early in the process, Crolla was able to attract Nathan Divey, who formerly worked as number one mechanic at Mercedes to Hynes’s old management client Lewis Hamilton and had moved on to Ferrari. Divey takes the role of chief mechanic, with ex-Williams man Pete Simmons as race team logistics manager. “Working with those two guys, we used the time really effectively by getting on with the recruitment almost immediately, because we wanted the best people,” continues Crolla. “We knew we’d have to wait for notice periods. We caught on that a lot of the teams had got wind of our recruitment possibly reaching their door, and we knew that they were taking steps to try and put people on longer notice periods and longer-term contracts.”

Meanwhile, work was continuing on Cadillac’s first F1 challenger. Other key names include aero chief Jon Tomlinson, formerly of Williams, and seasoned designer John McQuilliam, an ex-cohort of Lowdon’s at Manor. “Although we’ve had the experimental aero programme running for some time now in the wind tunnel in Cologne, unlike the other teams we cannot verify a single thing we’re doing in that tunnel with a car on track, so that’s been a big challenge,” sighs Lowdon. “But Jon’s really attacked that. John McQuilliam, I just think he’s a fabulous race car designer. He still appears to enjoy it and he takes it seriously – some of the creativity that comes out of the work that John and his team do is just fantastic. F1 is still a very creative process. I’m an engineer by training, so I know enough to be dangerous! But I look at what John and his design team produce, and what Rob and his team are building, under Nick’s technical direction, and I think it’s a work of art. Pat is in that position to oversee a lot of things, like a non-executive role, but he’s in there with his sleeves rolled up as well.”

“Much of what we do is centred around the ways Ferrari operate”

Despite what, on the face of it, appears to be an advantage for Cadillac in not being bound by F1’s aero testing restrictions due to being a new team, the design staff have been operating with serious handicaps. “Because we weren’t an F1 team, we weren’t allowed access to any of the FIA data or regulations or CAD models or whatever,” says Lowdon. “Also we weren’t allowed to have any wind tunnel tyres, because it’s only F1 teams who are allowed those, and we weren’t classed as an F1 team, so we had to make our own. Although we try to get them as close to the Pirellis as possible, it’s impossible to replicate them. We can’t benchmark anything that we’re doing in simulation, whether that’s in the wind tunnel or CFD or driver-in-the-loop simulator [in Charlotte]. But we knew that in advance – our eyes were wide open when we came in.”

Cadillac’s tie-up with Ferrari as engine supplier – until the bespoke engine from GM Performance Power Units comes on stream in 2029 – at least allowed some track activity last autumn. First, there came a trip to Fiorano in October to observe a Testing of Previous Cars session. “It was really useful, because so much of what we do is centred around Ferrari PU, Ferrari gearbox, and a lot of the ways that Ferrari operate,” reckons Crolla. “We had an FIA observer with us so that they could ensure that we did everything that we said we were going to do, which for that test was just to observe. It gave us that advance notice so that when we ran the car, we’d seen how Ferrari operate on PU and gearbox matters.”

The following month came Cadillac’s own TPC test at Imola, with Pérez at the wheel of a 2023 Ferrari, which Crolla describes as “incredibly valuable. It took a lot of preparation, there were a lot of hoops for us to jump through from a regulatory perspective, but the main reason for this test was to give our team experience of working together for the first time. What we needed to do was start practising our own Cadillac operating procedures and protocols. It was low-pressure, we had the circuit booked to ourselves, and it allowed everybody to go at the pace of the group naturally.

“It was good mileage for Sergio because he’d been out of the car for a while, but primarily from an operations perspective it was about our team working together.”

At the same time, sea freight was already being sent on its way to Melbourne for the opening race of the 2026 season. It’s the kind of thing you’d never think of if you weren’t working for an F1 team, but it’s just another string to the Crolla bow: “When I started on the project in April, the first thing I did was start ordering sea freight assets, because you need so many of them – race team sea freight, hospitality sea freight, overseas hospitality sea freight, Paddock Club sea freight, it’s a massive operation. We’ve got six sets. The first two left us in November, which was for Australia and Bahrain. China and Japan left us in December, which leaves two sets to start using for pre-season. Pulling six sets of really comprehensive, complete sea freight together in the time that they had was nothing short of brilliant – I’m proud of what the team did.”

“We measure our performance against what is in our control”

Comparing his experience of Haas, which joined the grid in 2016, Crolla says the Cadillac set-up is “really a scale matter. The sport has grown a lot since the transfer of ownership [to Liberty] back in 2017.” For Lowdon and his own benchmark of Manor’s 2010 entry, “the biggest difference is this time around the regulatory framework is significantly clearer. Back in ’09 it was almost weekly we’d meet with Bernie [Ecclestone] and the cost cap would change, the income would go down, the cap limit would increase, and then there was no cap and there was going to be a Resource Restriction Agreement, and that turned out to be something that some thought existed and others quite clearly just ignored. In comparison to the stability now, it was remarkable the challenge last time round.

“Also, one thing that’s humbling and really nice to see is that a lot of people involved in that have come back to join this project out of choice. We’ve kind of openly said that we want to create a team that everybody wants to join, and the people who are in it are proud to be in it and they want to stay in it. That’s what we had with Manor as well. We had that strong team spirit, which we needed because it’s such a difficult game. This is a proper race team – there’s no question about it. It’s not a corporate entity, but we proudly carry the brand and they’re an enormous global presence in the automotive world, and they have this incredible history of innovation and racing as well. We’re trying to build on that.”

But will that team be one that makes an immediate splash? Since long-time Andretti partner Dan Towriss and his TWG Motorsports company moved forward to front up the project and help push its blessing from F1 over the line, there has been talk over how it’ll fare.

Lowdon chuckles: “We could come up with a rocket ship, and there could be 10 teams that come up with a better rocket ship. The main thing is, we measure our performance primarily against what is in our control, and how well we’ve performed against that. We are well backed between TWG Motorsport and GM – we’ve got incredible financial backing and technical support and platform. We’ve got no excuses from that side, but equally there are a whole raft of things that are outside of our control, and we’re not going to beat ourselves up on them. We have no idea where we’re going to start, but we want to maximise our growth as a team as quickly as we can.” You might say that would be Cadillac’s Eldorado.