“We wanted to do this using a round table, but we couldn’t find one big enough,” Graeme Lowdon said apologetically. Very un-American, but don’t worry, the big stuff is coming.
Lowdon likened the scale of Cadillac’s journey to the F1 paddock to putting a man on the moon.
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The team’s headquarters and principal manufacturing base in Fishers, a suburb of Indianapolis, is a match for Aston Martin’s palatial set-up, measuring a massive 400,000 square feet alone.
Cadillac’s entry was confirmed only in March – an admissions process that took 17 weeks to complete when Lowdon first landed in the paddock with Manor 15 years ago, took 764 days to conclude in this case.
Cadillac is close to completing its headquarters in Silverstone (Photo: Cadillac)
When the process started, Lowdon was acting merely as a consultant.
“The first was how the entry process actually works, because it’s not clear. And the second was for this to work, you just have to start building a team.
“We never once had certainty during those 764 days. You are constantly doing a balancing act – and it’s not just money.
When the call came in March confirming Cadillac’s grid spot, Lowdon took it upon himself to address each member of staff individually – more than 300 people and growing rapidly – via a written note to each.
“Two things struck me: that it was a brilliant vote of confidence in us [by staff] and we must have an awful lot of people who are good at judging risk.”
British entrepreneur Lowdon previously worked in F1 for Manor (Photo: Cadillac)His racing career begin in the 1990s in IndyCar before guiding Manor into F1 in 2010.
The entry of one of America’s historic car marques might be seen as the inevitable consequence of American ownership of the sport.
The uptake in audience engagement, particularly in the United States with its unquenchable thirst for reality content, led not only to the rollout of two more races in the US – Las Vegas and Miami augmenting a schedule that already included a grand prix in Austin – but the ultimate expression of value, a movie.
Hollywood star Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes in F1: The Movie (Photo: Getty)
All that was missing in the Americanisation of Formula One was an actual team with the resources to realise the Hollywood fantasy.
Who might get the gig to drive the first Cadillacs on the grid is a source of febrile speculation, not least among the driver community.
Experience is certainly one criteria; another is an American passport.
Sergio Perez and Zhou Guanyu have both been linked with Cadillac (Photo: Getty)
Lowdon is long enough in this game to know that won’t be happening this side of soon, but that is the ambition. That and Making Cadillac Great Again.
“They’re also very seasoned racers, mainly in endurance racing and sports cars, so they have a racing DNA and Formula One provides that showcase for them.
“It’s massive, it’s growing, it’s well informed, and I think they deserve to see the full spectrum, with full grids and intense competition with teams.
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“I think of it like the Olympics: you get the best in the world, you call them together and they compete.
“You’ll see that we’ll go about things differently from a Haas or a Mercedes or a Ferrari. I think diversity’s a good thing.”
Having spent an estimated £450m to enter the sport – a fee to be distributed among the 10 teams in compensation for the greater spread of dividends and prize money from 2026, and what must be a similar sum on start-up costs, infrastructure investment and all the kit and caboodle required to complete a race season – you might term it a billion-dollar recce.
They have a fellow traveller in Cadillac, whose UK home sits opposite the circuit’s main entrance, a team preparing for lift-off via The Wing, as it were, and as you might expect, aiming straight for the moon.
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