The clock is ticking until Cadillac joins the Formula 1 grid. Literally.
“On the wall of every office that we have is a countdown clock,” team principal Graeme Lowdon told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It’s counting down to two things.”
One is the first “fire-up” of the car with its engine, and then the other is free practice at Cadillac's first official F1 session in Melbourne, Australia in March next year.
It will be the start of a new mission for General Motors, and the end of a process
to join F1 which included years of negotiations, a change of name and leadership, even a U.S. Justice Department investigation.
As a British racing boss creating an American team, Lowdon feels like an “inverse Ted Lasso,” the fictional U.S. soccer coach in London.
Hired in part for his experience navigating the sport's complex process for approving new teams, Lowdon says he's worked hard to adapt to U.S. racing culture for a team which will build its cars out of Fishers, Indiana.
There's also a design and manufacturing site near the British Grand Prix track at Silverstone, but Cadillac has a vision of running an “American team,” Lowdon said. The idea is to get as many different perspectives on designing a race car as possible.
“Formula 1 is a very creative business,” Lowdon said. "With diversity of thought comes innovation and hopefully lap time."
Past attempts to operate an F1 team outside of the sport's heartlands in England and Italy have rarely worked. Cadillac is taking lessons from the 1960s space race.
Rather than read a list of racing failures, Lowdon looked for non-F1 projects with “immovable deadlines, huge amount of public scrutiny, multiple sites, highly technical," he said. “The best example I could find were the the Apollo missions.”
“I looked a lot into how NASA had done the management structure of the business. I thought there were some very clever things that they did that we could build into a new design of a Formula 1 team, a complete new way of managing it. The primary objective was to maximize peer-to-peer communication between engineers.”
F1’s other American team, Haas, is more reliant on Europe. Its HQ is in North Carolina but the team is largely based in Britain and designs its cars in Italy.
While existing teams have their race drivers heavily involved in the design of 2026 cars, Lowdon said the fact that Cadillac hasn't confirmed who its drivers will be shouldn't be seen as a setback.
There are “three or four” names on Cadillac's shortlist halfway through the 2025 season and Lowdon says Cadillac has more leverage in contract discussions than usual.
“Because we’re out of sync with the other teams, we’re not under the same time pressure,” Lowdon said. “No driver is sitting there saying, ‘Oh yeah, Aston Martin are going to sign me next week,’ if you don’t sign them.”
The new team could be a way back to F1 for drivers like Sergio Perez, Valtteri Bottas or Zhou Guanyu who lost their race seats for 2025. There's also been speculation about various Americans and ex-F1 drivers like Mick Schumacher.
Bottas, a 10-time race winner for Mercedes, joked about the race to sign for Cadillac with a viral video on social media remarking on the “nice seat” in a Cadillac SUV.
“I’ve known him for a long time. I know his sense of humor, I appreciate his sense of humor and he’s got a big fan following,” Lowdon said. “My phone got super busy almost immediately when (Cadillac’s F1 entry) was confirmed. It was very clear that everyone wants to drive a Cadillac and so I guess Valtteri has just made it even more clear.”
___
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
