Cadillac’s F1 moonshot: how Apollo mission is guiding new team

F1 newest team applied to join the grid when applications were opened in early 2023, initially as part of Andretti Global, which races in IndyCar, IMSA and Formula E, and is led by Michael Andretti, the former F1 and IndyCar driver, with the involvement of his father, F1 world champion Mario Andretti.

It was the only bid approved by racing’s governing body, the FIA, but failed to get the green light from F1, amid disgruntlement from some existing teams which didn’t want their prize money to be diluted by an eleventh constructor.

Senior F1 figures also saw Michael Andretti as a hindrance, a situation that was only inflamed when US Congress members began investigating the situation for a potential breach of competition laws.

The situation was defused when the bid was rebranded. The team is now a partnership between TWG, Andretti Global’s parent company and General Motors, which owns Cadillac. It will use Ferrari engines until it develops its own power unit for the 2029 season.

The whole process took 764 days, a number that isn’t difficult to recall for Lowdon, who insists that he never lost faith in getting the go-ahead.

It’s just as well because he had to begin spending money on developing a car, knowing that if he waited for final approval, it would be too late.

“You can’t wait to actually get the approval,” he says. “You have to take a risk if you’re going to race because the entry process is specifically for entry in a certain number of championship years. So if you just wait until you get the entry and then start doing everything that we’ve been doing, you would time out.”

The team set-up in Silverstone in April 2024 and has been working at pace ever since. “One of the advantages – and there have been very few, I have to say –  of coming in as a new team is we were outside of the aero regulations until earlier this year.

“It meant that we could go into the wind tunnel in the middle of last year with a ‘26 car already. That said, we couldn’t get any tyres from Pirelli because you have to be a Formula 1 team, so we have to make our own wind tunnel tires. So there were drawbacks to the process, but we’ve been in that wind tunnel in Cologne now with the ‘26 car since the middle of last year.

“By December of last year, we were already prototyping together with our partners AP Racing [new] brake and brake duct assemblies. We actually had our first 2026 floor delivered in January. So that’s before we even got the entry. There is no other way of doing the process as it currently stands.”

One aspect to the simultaneous processes of recruiting, designing and developing facilities is that teams have had to get used to moving from one temporary location to another, as the Silverstone site, which will consist of four existing industrial buildings, is adapted to the team.

It’s clearly a work in progress as we walk past a hall that’s been excavated to create the solid foundations needed for equipment and into a temporary model shop where parts for the wind tunnel model are 3D-printed and machined. Staff can see the fruits of their labour with a feed from the tunnel in Germany.

This is one of Silverstone’s key roles within the Cadillac team: while the car will be assembled in the new Fishers, Indiana headquarters, the aero modelling will be carried out in Britain, where the parts are collected by van and taken to Cologne for testing.

Much of the design work will be carried out at Silverstone too, where the team can more easily coax experienced engineers from rival teams. We walk through open plan offices emblazoned with images of Mario Andretti’s racing career and Cadillac’s IMSA sports cars, where staff are examining CAD images of various car parts.

In addition to the screens counting down to the first race, is one showing a spreadsheet with each major deadline, right up to the first races of next year. It’s scattered with tasks such as “electrical system bench test” and “transmission test” before more major landmarks later in the year when the bodywork, nose and floor are “released”.

The first chassis has already been tested internally, and another will now be built to undergo official tests, under FIA supervision. Some involve simulating crashes, while others require loads to be gradually applied. “You basically cover it with, like, an octopus of microphones and then apply the loads and listen to the creaks and groans and hopefully not big bangs,” says Lowdon.

Getting to this stage, this quickly, has involved hiring 400 staff and using external suppliers to build components before the US factory is completed.

The team still needs a further 200 staff before it goes racing, and must co-ordinate this across the Atlantic. The time difference isn’t a problem, Lowdon jokes, “because nobody ever sleeps”.

The structure of the team, however, is modelled on NASA’s management of the Apollo project, which similarly had multiple teams working over numerous locations, and shies away from one figure dictating specific orders.

“It’s a very, very flat management structure,” says Lowdon. “Race teams are often often described in military terms. If you see a garage tour, someone will say, ‘this is organised in a kind of pyramid and you have one person at the top and the typical middle structure is command and control’. So you issue commands, people do things.

“When it’s multi-site like this, that becomes a massive challenge. What you can’t have is an engineer here having to go up and down a particular hierarchy, and then hop across an hour in, not just a different geographic location, but a different country, altogether.

“Instead, it’s kind of a different structure where it’s mission control instead of command and control. So you have this really flat structure, engineers are able to talk directly to each other, and the thing that’s heavily imparted on them is is the mission itself. Everyone knows what the mission is. They know what needs to be done. They don’t have to be told, ‘go and make six bits or whatever’. The hierarchy is stripped out, in a sense.

“We split the business into 12 distinct offices. They all communicate with each other, and they are all totally geographically agnostic. It doesn’t matter where you sit. And so far, it works”

One element completely absent from the team so far are drivers. These are not, Lowdon, insists, a priority, when there is a car to be built but does say that they are aware of who might be available. Sergio Perez, Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu are among those linked with the team and they appear to have a greater chance than any rookie.

“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,” he says.

The prospect of starting last on the grid might not sound like an enticing prospect for drivers or engineers, but Cadillac is attracting talent. Former Renault and Lotus technical director Nick Chester has joined, along with chief operating officer Rob White, formerly operations director at Alpine. Pat Symonds, who was chief technical officer for Williams and F1, is on board as a consultant.

“If you can create an environment that people find attractive, then you get good people,” says Lowdon who enthuses about the team spirit within Cadillac.

There’s a glimpse of it in some classic F1 humour as we pass through the model shop. Alongside carbon fibre model components is a space on the shelf filled with chromed long, narrow chromed cylinders, as well as a venturi-type device that’s wide at one end and narrows to a tube at the other. “Hoover upgrades” is the label given to these vacuum cleaner attachments.

“It all starts with the people,” says Lowdon. “Every team, every high performance team, everything, starts, end, middle bit, everything is about just getting good people.”