Cadillac

Of all the unknowns on this year’s grid, none come with more unanswered questions than Cadillac. ‘America’s Newest Team’ – a statement that must grate with neighbours Haas – really is brand new. There’s been no takeovers here, no rebranding, it’s a ground-up operation that’s newly staffed and based in a mixture of Indiana, North Carolina and Silverstone, all assembled (somehow!) in less than a year. Heavily backed by General Motors, the team will begin life using a customer Ferrari engine (well, it wasn’t going to choose Ford, was it?!) but has aspirations to become a full engine manufacturer by 2029.

At the head of it all is Briton Graeme Lowdon (remember him from Manor-Marussia?). Bold moves, as was revealing its livery during the Superbowl LX. The car is titled MAC, standing for Mario Andretti Cadillac as a tribute to its 1978 world champion ambassador. Drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez share a combined 527 grand prix starts and 16 wins.

11 Sergio Pérez Born January 1990, Mexico Starts 281 Wins 6 / Podiums 39 / Poles 3 Notable achievements 2023 second, 2022 third, 2010 GP2 Series second, 2007 British F3 International Series National Class champion

77 Valtteri Bottas Born August 1989, Finland Starts 246 Wins 10 / Podiums 67 / Poles 20 Notable achievements 2021 third, 2020 second, 2019 second, 2017 third, 2011 GP3 Series champion

How to get on the grid in 366 days

Cadillac has shifted mountains to make its way to the grid this season, with rapid development needed to make the start of the season. Marcus Simmons visits the new team at Silverstone to find out how they did it

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.”

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

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 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 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 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.

“Much of what we do is centred on the ways Ferrari operates”

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 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. “Everything needs to be 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 just taking 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’ 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.”

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

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 on Ferrari PU, Ferrari gearbox, and a lot of the ways that Ferrari operates,” 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 operates 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 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 2026. 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 complete sea freight together in the time that they had was nothing short of brilliant – I’m proud of what the team did.”

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] in 2017.” For Lowdon and his own benchmark of Manor’s 2010 entry, “the biggest difference is 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. It’s not a corporate entity, but we proudly carry the brand and they’re an enormous global presence and they have this incredible history of innovation and racing. 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.

It started with a phone call

For Graeme Lowdon, his journey to becoming team principal at Cadillac F1 began with a conversation with Mario Andretti – who, despite his age, remains a dynamo of energy…

“I was driving down the A1, and I got a call from someone whose opinion I respect, and they said, ‘Would you take a call from the group that are involved with Andretti looking at F1?’”

That’s Graeme Lowdon talking of his introduction to the Cadillac project he now fronts.

“This was on the tail end of when they were looking to originally buy Sauber, and that didn’t work out, so they decided they wanted to look at a new entry,” he continues. “We had a call – the backers of the project were on it, as were Michael and Mario Andretti. My involvement began with advising them on how to go through the entry process to F1. And I remember that call ended with Mario saying, ‘OK this sounds good – you know how the process works.’

“When you’ve got the 1978 world champion telling you something like that, it sticks in your mind. I remember thinking, ‘I’d better not let him down!’”

Although Michael Andretti’s well-documented personality clash with former Liberty CEO Greg Maffei didn’t help the team’s prospects of approval, father Mario is still involved with Cadillac, the 85-year-old holding an ambassadorial role. Lowdon is a successful man in a high-pressure world, but allows an endearing glimpse of a man who was a schoolboy fan of F1 when he discusses Mario.

“You can tell a world champion when you’re talking to them, you can tell a racer,” he says. “He’s still a hugely competitive spirit, and a guy with a huge amount of energy, and what’s clear is a love of F1. It’s cool when you look back at the history of what he did; he did that because he loved F1, when he was racing on both sides of the Atlantic, just racing everything going but moving heaven and earth to be involved because he had that love from a very early age – and it’s still there and it’s quite infectious.”

That, of course, was instilled in Andretti and twin brother Aldo as young boys in Italy before their family emigrated. “That crawling under the fence at Monza and watching the cars, that’s what gave him the spark and fuelled it all,” smiles Lowdon. “For me, that twinkle’s still there in his eyes. We talk every so often. It’s good; we’re a racing team, we’re not a corporate conglomerate, so we should have those conversations.”

Bottas on Cadillac’s F1 reality check: learn, finish races, don’t be last

Cadillac will need to lean on the experience of its drivers this season

cadillac f1 Cadillac’s Formula 1 project has officially moved from theory to reality, and its expectations remain deliberately modest. After completing its first shakedown at Silverstone and joining the rest of the field for the opening days of 2026 testing in Barcelona, the American team’s new driver line-up has been clear-eyed about what success looks like in year one.

“We are being realistic,” Valtteri Bottas tells Motor Sport. “The main thing is to get a reliable car to start with and finish the races, and try not to be last, and that’s already a starting point.”

Cadillac arrived in Spain having already logged its first miles at Silverstone, a major milestone for a team built from scratch in a relatively short space of time under F1’s sweeping new technical regulations.

Now running alongside established outfits for the first time, the focus has shifted from launch deadlines to learning curves.

The team’s initial driver pairing of Bottas and Sergio Pérez boasts 16 grand prix victories and experience across six different established teams, a deliberate strategy, according to team principal Graeme Lowdon.

“We prioritised not just experience, but experience with multiple championship-winning teams,” Lowdon explains. “When you bring in a new team, the driver plays a huge role in gelling the engineering group and the garage together. We don’t have to show them where the paddock turnstile is.”

“It’s not really about where we start, it’s about where we end up”

Both drivers are returning to full-time F1 seats after spending 2025 away from the grid.

Bottas acted as Mercedes’ reserve following his exit from Sauber, while Pérez stepped aside after losing his Red Bull seat at the end of 2024.

But they both insist Cadillac was a proactive choice rather than a last resort.

“For me, F1 was always the priority,” Bottas says. “I really believed in this project, and it felt like I was a priority for them as well.”

Pérez echoes that view, revealing he began working with Cadillac as soon as his contract was signed last summer.

“Once it became clear they were coming into F1, it was pretty straightforward,” he says. “This was a project that made me enthusiastic to come back.”

The timing of Cadillac’s entry is widely seen as advantageous, coinciding with new chassis, power units and tyres across the grid in 2026 — an unusual reset that may reduce the typical performance gap facing new teams.

“We all start from zero anyway,” Pérez says. “The regulation changes are huge, especially on the engine side, and that will impact driving styles a lot.”

Still, expectations inside the garage remain intentionally conservative. Points are an ambition rather than an assumption, with progress — rather than position — the key internal benchmark.

“Cadillac should be the team that progresses the most throughout the year,” Pérez says.

Bottas strikes a similar note, underlining that Barcelona’s test represents the beginning of a longer process rather than a verdict on competitiveness. “It’s not that much about where we start,” he says. “It’s about where we end up.”

Peak practice

Team manager Peter Crolla recalls Cadillac’s real-time race rehearsals through 2025

Cadillac didn’t have a car last year, but it did have use of General Motors’ simulator in Charlotte, North Carolina. From mid-season on, this allowed the team to hone its procedures by following grand prix weekends in real time – from bases on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

“We had an operations room running in Silverstone, and one in Charlotte,” explains team manager Peter Crolla of what came to be known as ‘rehearsals’. “Each rehearsal project grew – every time we did one, processes were more advanced, communication protocols were more advanced, the technology we had at our disposal was more advanced, and it was a fantastic rate of progression. From the first ones being rough and ready, we looked at and analysed what we were missing, so when the next one came round we were plugging the holes.

“We went from a fairly basic intercom system in the early rehearsals to what I would see as a communication network capable of supporting a full race team. From my side the biggest thing was understanding names, roles, voices, how they speak, and we were quite early in how we defined what our protocols would be in communication over radio and intercom.”

Mostly, it was Crolla’s ex-Haas F1 colleague Pietro Fittipaldi or former IndyCar champion Simon Pagenaud on the sim. But the virtual track time was only a small part of the process, like in real life.

“Every race weekend we’d carry out all our meetings, we’d have a full schedule, we’d allocate the right activities at the right time, so everybody started getting into a routine,” says Crolla. “Race teams are institutionalised in how they operate, and we like that level of continuity, so we started full race weekends from the start of the programme. We had a simulator operating for every session, but then we also adopted a real team that we followed throughout the sessions. So when it came to races, the team that we’d adopted, we were making calls on when we thought they should make a pitstop, looking at their lap times, tyre degradation, where they were in traffic.”

There were even ‘virtual’ scrutineering documents and parc fermé requests submitted to a phantom FIA, adds Crolla: “To make our lives as hard as possible so we could be best prepared for the real thing.”