Inside Cadillac’s F1 journey: ‘Our Silverstone shakedown was a miracle’ | Cadillac
When the new Formula One season begins Sunday amid the usual feverish excitement and anticipation, think of the whirlwind of the Cadillac team. Before the lights go out in Melbourne, the F1 newcomer will have a deserved chance to catch his breath and savor for a moment the remarkable feat of simply making it to the starting gate.
The General Motors-backed American team was built, aside from those involved in advance planning, from scratch, within a year and a day after its entry was formally approved. As their team manager, Graeme Lowdon, explained, this process had started in an empty room with a screwdriver and a sheet of A4 paper.
Even though Audi is also a newcomer, they took over the existing Sauber team; Cadillac is the first new automaker to enter as a startup since Haas joined a decade ago. Drivers Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez will be the veterans at the front and Bottas, a 10-time race winner who competed alongside Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes when the team was the benchmark in F1, is well placed to appreciate what Cadillac has achieved.
“Everyone has worked really hard over the last few months,” he says. “For us to do our shakedown in January at Silverstone, for me it was a miracle. When you put it into perspective, what an achievement for a team that started on its feet.”
“It’s hard to explain how many hundreds of people you need. How many thousands of parts you have to design first and then build. There are so many things in the car that can go wrong. It’s so much work on everyone’s part to get here. It’s really important to try to get that across, because people just hear, ‘Oh, it’s a new team,’ and assume it was a relatively simple thing.”
Since getting the provisional green light at the 2024 Las Vegas GP, the team, which will use Ferrari engines until 2029 when General Motors will produce its first powertrains, has been building at a breakneck pace across the board. The workforce stands at 600 people, with recruitment reaching a rate of one per day during the campaign. Alongside their UK facility at Silverstone, they are completing a new headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and building the engine manufacturing plant at GM’s Charlotte, North Carolina plants.
Everyone involved in the project has highlighted GM’s level of commitment and all indications are that the manufacturer has a long-term ambition and is committed to achieving its goal of becoming a world championship-winning force, rather than playing the part. That’s why they looked for talent.
Williams’ Jon Tomlinson was named head of aerodynamics. Nick Chester, formerly of Renault, is the technical director and the team boss is the very experienced Peter Crolla, who joined from Haas. Notably, they also recruited Pat Symonds from Benetton, Renault and Williams, who was also recently F1’s technical director and had observed Cadillac’s early bids for a place on the grid.
Symonds is their engineering consultant and has worked extensively in F1 at almost every level since 1979. He liked what he saw at Cadillac from the start. “There are really cutting-edge things happening here,” he said. “We have a very good base, I’m absolutely sure of that. We have very good people.”
Like Bottas, he believes the scale of the task he joined in January 2025 may not have been fully appreciated. “We had to go from 125 people to 550 people in one year. How many companies grow at that rate? But it’s still a huge task and it’s even bigger because there’s nothing to postpone. In F1, every year you design a new car, but you’re not going to change the brake pedal, you’re not going to change the steering column, things like that. You have a lot of elements that you don’t need to rethink.
“We had to design every component of the car from scratch, and that’s a very difficult task.”
Lowdon likened their efforts to those of the Apollo moon landings in that they had a fixed timetable and brought together the disparate parts of a project to form a cohesive whole. In their various facilities, prominent clocks counted down, second by second, to that first race. An insistent and punctual concentration was necessary for greater motivation.
Quick guide
American forays into Formula 1
To show
Vroom in the United States
Beetle
Two ambitious Americans, Lance Reventlow and Bruce Kessler, looked at what the Europeans were doing at Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Jaguar and decided they could build a better car. The victories came at the 1958 LA Times Grand Prix at Riverside Raceway and their front-engine drivers competed in 93 races, with 39 wins and 32 podiums through 1963. In F1, they competed in only one full season – 1960 – racing in six of the 10 grands prix, finishing 10th with Chuck Daigh at the United States Grand Prix, won by Stirling Moss in a Lotus-Climax.
Eagle
Dan Gurney and Le Mans winner Carroll Shelby founded All American Racers in 1964 and competed in various classes before launching into F1 with the patriotic name Eagle. The star-studded team was based in Rye, East Sussex and ran British-made Weslake engines. They raced in 25 grands prix, entering a total of 34 cars. At the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix, Gurney scored the first “all-American” victory in a grand prix since Jimmy Murphy’s triumph with Duesenberg at the 1921 French Grand Prix. An American team has yet to repeat this dual feat.
Thought
Last American team to win a race – the 1976 Austrian Grand Prix, with Northern Irishman John Watson driving (below). The Penskes are best known as Indycar drivers, but their PC1 cars debuted in 1974. They scored no points that year and the following season was marred by the death of their driver Mark Donohue.
Haas
A full-fledged American team returned to F1 in 2016, purchasing the bankrupt Marussia. Based in Banbury, they still lead the way with Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman at the wheel. But still no victory, with only one pole won in Brazil in 2022.
Cadillac
The General Motors giant is eager to tap into the Race to Survive/Gen Z market and is therefore launching a team with its first brand on the car next year.
On the eve of zero o’clock, the team is at least ready to take off. They did well to have the car built to fully participate in the first pre-season testing session (a feat notably not achieved by Williams or Aston Martin) as was observed with respect throughout the paddock.
“Not only are you here, but you look like a real professional team,” was the reaction, Symonds said. “It’s very rewarding. It comes from very experienced people in other teams and from drivers in the world championship.”
Cadillac, however, is under no illusions about its real situation. At best perhaps 10th fastest, ahead of only an Aston Martin currently in difficulty, the team knows how much they still have to do. The first objective is to reach the flag, to do it again and again. Then aim for points, which if they achieve this season will rightly be celebrated as a victory. GM isn’t expecting miracles, but everyone on the team is adamant they need to show progress. Simply being there is not enough and would be considered unacceptable given their ambition.
“If we start, for example, from the back, it doesn’t matter, but we have to get out of there,” Bottas said bluntly. “We have to continue to improve and move forward. If we start from the back and finish at the back, that’s not progress. If we see improvements throughout the year, with the team, with the car, that’s the main thing.”
Expectations are managed, but with that comes the harsh reality of maintaining morale throughout a 24-race season while bringing up the rear of the peloton. Maintaining a sense of momentum, even if it’s barely perceptible, could still prove as difficult a challenge as any so far. As it stands, there is great optimism for this bold experiment to finally bear fruit at Albert Park – and while there won’t be a fairytale victory for Cadillac, they at least aim to tell a compelling story and reach the top.
“No compromise has been made on quality, everything is the best possible,” Bottas said. “It gives me confidence that the team is really committed to achieving this. We still have a long way to go to become something like Mercedes, but the foundations are being built so that it can become something like Mercedes.”
