Cadillac will be the first new Formula 1 team in a decade when it joins the grid next year.
Graeme Lowden, their team principal, understands the scale of the challenge as he has experienced it before. His most recent F1 experience was at the team known as Virgin when it entered F1 15 years ago.Although it outlasted its fellow 2010 newcomers Lotus (later Caterham) and HRT, Lowden’s last team fell into administration at the end of 2016. Virgin went through three different identities in six years as different backers came and went.
But Cadillac will benefit enormously from the backing of US carmaking giant General Motors and input from sports group TWG, according to Lowden. “Far the biggest thing that’s been helpful is the foundations that we’ve got, these partnerships with TWG and GM,” he said in response to a question from RaceFans.
“The investment that has gone in prior to there being a confirmation of entries is really very, very impressive and is a reflection of the commitment that the shareholders have to this sport.”
The new team originally applied to enter F1 under the name Andretti. Cadillac joined the project in November 2023 and, after Formula One Management expressed doubt over the value of the Andretti brand to F1, applied its name to the project.
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Lowden says the manufacturer is fully invested in competing in F1. “It’s obviously a brand of General Motors, GM needs no introduction, but one of the things that I particularly like about the involvement of GM is this is not a ‘putting a sticker on a car’ exercise,” he said. “This is a full involvement of an incredibly technically advanced and technically aware company and it’s extremely good that we can draw upon that.”
“They also have involvement and ownership in other sports as well, whether it’s NBA, Premier League, also a really wide range of sports. So there’s also insight and perspective that we can draw from there.”
Although Cadillac had to overcome significant opposition from FOM to gain its place on the grid for the 2026 F1 season, Lowden says his new team faces more favourable circumstances as it enters the series than his last one did.
Virgin’s bid to enter F1 was approved in 2009 when the series made its first attempt to introduce a cost cap. Under regulations planned for 2010, newcomers were offered some rules breaks in exchange for committing to a spending limit.
However the regulations were never approved, meaning Virgin and their fellow newcomers found themselves at an immediate competitive disadvantage. It took until 2021 for F1 to finally introduce a spending limit for teams, by which time Virgin and the rest were long gone.
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“The last time I was involved in bringing a new team in the goalposts changed hugely,” said Lowden. “It’s a matter of history now what went through.
The team has already attracted several well-known names within the sport. “Very experienced people are on board like Nick Chester, Pat Symonds, and on the commercial side Caroline McGrory. These are people who’ve spent decades in Formula 1.”
Symonds was a particularly eye-catching hire, as the former F1 engineering director last worked at the series itself, framing the very technical regulations Cadillac and its rivals will compete under next year. However Lowden says that detail was secondary to the team’s interest in hiring him.
“Pat’s an incredibly valuable addition to anybody’s team,” he said. “It’s less that he was involved in the rules, it’s just he’s Pat Symonds and he knows what he’s doing and he’s got vast experience.
“I’ve been racing with him before so it wasn’t a difficult decision for me to look to go racing with Pat again because I know what he can do. Is it helpful that he understands the rule set? Yes, but I think that’s outweighed by just the fact that he’s good at what he does.”
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Given his experience of working for a new team in the past, Lowden is understandably reluctant to set goals, but stresses that “getting on the grid, for us that just has to be a given.”
“We just have to be there and we want to push as hard as we can,” he said. “But it is incredibly difficult to set expectations for a new team for a whole bunch of reasons.
“Yes, we’ve got a lot of experienced people. But also a team operates through a highly complex network of processes and what we don’t yet have – and no new team ever does have – is any kind of validation of the processes themselves.
“A good example would be: yes, we’re very active in the wind tunnel at the moment, but we can’t correlate what the wind tunnel does with the track because we’re not racing. And you can’t just go and race a Formula 1 car on your own, it’s just not allowed under the rules.
“So it’s very, very difficult to set expectations other than in terms of what we are in control of. That [means] delivering the car that we want, on time, with the group of people that we want. All of those things, we hold ourselves to really, really high standards. But in terms of measuring ourselves against others, I think it’s even more complicated than normal.”
However he insists the team will not be satisfied to just make up the numbers. “The ambition […] is limitless,” he said. “Just being part of Formula 1 is not the objective. We do want to be a meaningful part of the competition, but we recognise that that can take time.”
Compared to what he’s experienced before in F1, Lowden believes he has a much better chance of success this time. “In terms of my experience bringing teams in, I’ve never been involved in something that’s so well-structured and so well-backed and so well-funded as well,” he said. “That certainly changes the landscape completely. Not just a little bit: Completely.”
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BasCB (@bascb)
11th March 2025, 7:55
I do hope this new team “sticks” for a solid period of time and really becomes part of the grid. More cars on track, more spots for drivers and more room for engineers to develop, gain experience and hopefully surprise us is good.
But I guess we’ll have to see how they do, Haas also was full of grand words, and while they certainly did a LOT better than the previous generation of entrants, they aren’t really setting the grid alight either. Welcom GM/Cadillac.
Bullfrog (@bullfrog)
11th March 2025, 8:08
Don’t worry about correlating the wind tunnel data – some F1 teams seemed to use the wrong scale or units for years, wondering why their upgrades didn’t work, before they did that!
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
11th March 2025, 21:32
@bullfrog One of the many advantages Cadillac will have over Manor is that it will release its debut car after it has been inside a wind tunnel ;)
bernasaurus (@bernasaurus)
11th March 2025, 11:50
I can’t be the only one who thinks the timescale is very narrow. I love that they’re part of the grid and sorry that it was such a painful political fight. But starting from scratch, even with money, the first race is 12 months away, they didn’t buy Enstone like most people do. They have to hookup the Wifi before starting on the front wing design.
It’s a lot of infrastructure to build in a short space of time. Aston Martin / Stroll’s base has grown massively, but even without that they could still build a car. Cadillac, it’s going to be tough starting from a complete blank bit of paper.
I’m happy for their endeavour, and hope they succeed. All we need now is two more teams and 26 drivers again.
grat
11th March 2025, 16:34
Except Andretti was building out the infrastructure two years ago. As far as I know, Cadillac is the only team with a 2026 compliant design currently doing wind tunnel testing.
Matt (@hollidog)
12th March 2025, 11:44
@Grat every team will have had a 2026 car in the tunnel the minute the regs lifted the ban on the first of January.
MichaelN
11th March 2025, 16:45
They didn’t start now, they had a pitch to start this year. They’ll have done a lot of prep work.
And as we’ve seen, you can apparently build a perfectly fine F1 car with Williams’ ancient facilities and lack of funding. The trick is in those last few percentage points.
anon
11th March 2025, 21:39
@bernasaurus there are a combination of different factors that mean they think the timescales are achievable.
As mentioned by previous posters, whilst the formal announcement has come now, the team is understood to have already begun development work on their 2026 car, as well as having already made some investments in facilities to support their operations.
Additionally, the team have also mentioned that, in the shorter term, they are also planning to make use of the extensive network of sub-contractors that exist in the motorsport industry to be able to manufacture some components out of house, whilst using Ferrari’s power unit and transmission is intended to smooth out those operations for the short to medium term.
Cranberry
11th March 2025, 13:09
Hopefully they do well, it’s just odd that they chose their Cadillac-brand instead of Chevrolet…
Would’ve been quite something to have a F1 car with the name “Corvette blabla”.
Here’s to hoping they stick around and don’t fold within a handful of years.
To me it seems HAAS has all but given up on actually performing, and is just doing the bare minimum to keep the team alive while looking for a buyer.
Americans just can’t F1…
MichaelN
11th March 2025, 17:14
Good thing F1 cars aren’t made out of steel and aluminum, I guess.
Not so much for the other things GM makes. Oopsy.
grat
11th March 2025, 20:05
They moved up from 10th to 7th from 2023 to 2024. They outperformed RB, Williams and Sauber.
Are you watching the same Formula 1 championship as me?
anon
11th March 2025, 21:43
grat, and that was, in some ways, a bit of an unlucky result – had Alpine not been somewhat lucky with circumstances in Brazil, then Haas would probably have beaten them to 6th in the WCC.
Yes (@come-on-kubica)
11th March 2025, 13:22
It is a shame Manor dropped as someone could have bought their entry on the cheap. Bad move from the big teams.
montreal95 (@montreal95)
11th March 2025, 13:38
I was always impressed by Loudon. People say all he was is a team principal of a team that folded. But he kept that team’s head above the water for 7 seasons against impossible odds after the betrayal at the very beginning by Mosley and the poison dwarf. Before they started most assumed they will be the 2nd of the 4 teams to go under, just behind Hispania(HRT) and before Lotus Caterham and definetely before the most fancied of the 4 USF1 which actually folded before they even started. What GL had managed to achieve with such pitifully meager resources was stunning. So compared with Virgin/Marussia/Manor this must feel like heaven to him. Now he must show that there are other sides to his game, namely fighting off corporate interference so the team can get on with the gargantuan job at hand. Good luck Graeme! I’ll be cheering for you.
Adrian Hancox (@ahxshades)
11th March 2025, 15:16
Hear Hear – I will absolutely be pulling for them when they join – and hoping they do well. Fi benefits from this expansion.
MazdaChris (@mazdachris)
11th March 2025, 15:41
It’s impossible to predict with any accuracy what the future will look like for the Cadillac F1 team. In theory at least, they will have many of the crucial elements required to be successful – critically, they will have a wealth of resources to throw at the problem. But while they may be able to appoint excellent people to key roles, it would be naive to think that all you need is to hire the best people and automatically be successful.
At its core, the business of an F1 team is centred around an endless cycle of refinement and optimisation. This is true of developing a car, but it’s also true of developing the team. As a business analyst, I can go into a business, review the internal business processes, assess the strengths and weaknesses in skills and team performances, and come up with a raft of suggestions for improvement. But you can only really do that against an established baseline. You can’t refine or optimise something that doesn’t aready exist.
F1’s history is full of examples of teams who have, on paper, had all of the things they need to succeed, and yet consistently underperformed. This is because you also need all of those elements – the designers, fabricators, engineers, heads of units, and so on – to function effectively together in a way that maximises potential. Even major established teams with huge resources and long histories can fall afoul here. Consider Ferrari, McLaren, Williams, and many others, all of whom have had periods in the doldrums.
The future for Cadillac may well hold success. But you have to realistically expect them to start at a low level, and take a considerable amount of time before they can really get the team working correctly to deliver the results they’re hoping for. The most important question for me, is how long the execs are prepared to continue putting money into the project before that success materialises.
Edvaldo
11th March 2025, 19:53
Remember: Virgin was the team that was all proud and bragging about designing their car entirely on CFD as if they were smarter than everyone else who were using wind tunnels and models.
Then came the news their fuel tank was too small to even complete a race distance, and it took them some races to fix that.
Cadillac can’t much do worse than that.
grat
11th March 2025, 20:10
Manor (along with Lotus and HRT) had been promised they could compete at £40 million per season, and actually win races and make money.
What CFD had to do with the size of the fuel tank, I’m not sure– I suspect it was more to do with the Cosworth V8 being thirstier than expected.
Edvaldo
11th March 2025, 20:20
It has nothing to do with the size of the tank, but with them being confident they knew how to do F1 on the cheap and not embarrass themselves.
Other three teams used Cosworths that year and didn’t make the same mistake, so the issues with the size of the tank have nothing to do with the engine either.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
11th March 2025, 21:38
grat, the original promise when Virgin and co signed on was $20 million, which was raised to $40 million within a month of the deadline. Then it disappeared altogether.
(£40 million would have been more than a couple of the then-extant teams were spending in 2010, specifically Sauber and Force India).
At that point, all the new teams had to do a lot of cost-cutting and also sell to richer backers (or go bust like USF1 did). Skipping the wind tunnel was part of how Manor-turned-Virgin managed to keep vaguely afloat through 2010. It looked horrendous until the redesigned version could be deployed, but it meant the team lived to fight another day. It was less “bragging about being smarter” than “experimenting out of necessity and not sulking about it”.