Inside Cadillac’s $1bn project to take F1 by storm ...Middle East

The man responsible for Cadillac’s entry into Formula One next season welcomed reporters to a makeshift office in the shell of a new building at the team’s UK headquarters at Silverstone.

“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.

The race to 2026 begins. Join the journey.

TWG Motorsports | @Cadillac | @GM | @F1 #F1 #CadillacF1Team pic.twitter.com/TWC78yLdKf

— Cadillac Formula 1 Team (@Cadillac_F1) May 8, 2025

Straddling sites in Indiana, North Carolina and Michigan as well as Silverstone, the gargantuan, transatlantic project reflects the desire of American motor manufacturer, General Motors, to put a Maga stamp on the greatest auto show on earth via the Cadillac brand.

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.

The power unit, due for delivery in 2029, will be made at a facility near Charlotte, North Carolina. Until that date, Cadillac will deploy Ferrari engines and gearboxes.

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.

That Cadillac will be ready to race in Melbourne next year demonstrates not only its formidable level of commitment but the risks taken hiring staff and rolling out the infrastructure and support systems long before official approval was granted.

When the process started, Lowdon was acting merely as a consultant.

“I gave two initial pieces of advice,” he says.

“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.

“So then they said: ‘Can you help us build it?’ And I was presented with exactly the question that you just asked, which is, well, how do you build a works-level Formula One team from scratch when you don’t know if you’ve got an entry or not?

“We never once had certainty during those 764 days. You are constantly doing a balancing act – and it’s not just money.

“You can’t employ people in the US or here if you think it’s not going to work – they are leaving a safe job and have families with responsibilities. That period was unbelievably difficult, very intense.”

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.

“One of the best days here was telling everyone that we had the entry,” he says.

“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.”

Including Lowdon, a mechanical engineer by qualification and a meld of business acumen, entrepreneurship and motorsport immersion.

His racing career begin in the 1990s in IndyCar before guiding Manor into F1 in 2010.

Manor stuck at it for five years but had none of the economic power or big-brand allure to stay the course.

The entry of one of America’s historic car marques might be seen as the inevitable consequence of American ownership of the sport.

Since acquiring the commercial rights of F1 from Bernie Ecclestone eight years ago, Liberty Media have transformed the landscape, catapulting F1 into the entertainment space with huge success, not least the flagship deal with Netflix to allow cameras unprecedented behind-the-scenes access.

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.

And not just any old flick, but one endorsed by that shrine to idealised masculinity, Brad Pitt, who, as Sonny Hayes, hams his way through F1: The Movie and gets the girl too.

All that was missing in the Americanisation of Formula One was an actual team with the resources to realise the Hollywood fantasy.

Now they have one, a big manufacturer with a dream to dominate the epoch in a way Ferrari did the last century, an all-singing, all-dancing monument to America’s proud automotive and engineering tradition. Applicants for the Sonny Hayes and Joshua Pearce roles, apply within.

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.

Ex-Merc man Valtteri Bottas is not shy in advertising his availability. Sergio Perez, Ferrari reserve driver Zhou Guanyu, managed by Lowdon, and Mick Schumacher are others in the frame, plus American IndyCar dude Colton Herta.

Experience is certainly one criteria; another is an American passport.

Ultimately the story demands an American hotshot to take down Max Verstappen on the final bend at the last race of at least one season.

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.

“Cadillac has a huge history of innovation, of engineering and excellence: 120 years or so of creating really innovative things on the road-car side of things,” he says.

“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.

“And I think they bring something different into Formula One. The most valuable asset Formula One has is the fan base.

“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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“You can’t call Formula One the pinnacle of the sport unless it is a true world championship.

“I think of it like the Olympics: you get the best in the world, you call them together and they compete.

“I think the fans would feel a bit short-changed if you had a 100m final with only me and you.

“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.”

Lowdon will be in the paddock at Silverstone this weekend alongside Dan Towriss, chief executive of TWG Motorsports – which is a subsidiary of TWG Global, who are also part-owners of Chelsea FC – sampling the atmosphere at what will be one of its home races next season.

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.

Silverstone, like Formula One, is in the midst of its own transformation of course, reflecting the demands of today’s modern audience.

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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