During an extensive media session on Monday, Cadillac F1 team principal Graeme Lowdon expressed the importance of being involved in building up talent so that it does not end up at the “end of a conveyor belt.”
Lowdon has already stated that the drivers will be picked on “merit” and that Cadillac is not shying away from looking outside F1.
Before Cadillac was announced to join F1, the team entertained the thought of entering F2 or F3.
Cadillac F1 has since steered away from the possibility of joining F2 or F3, according to the Brit.
Graeme Lowdon does, however, acknowledge the importance of having strong talent at the helm who can extract the maximum potential. The focus is on getting quality in the positions to help build and deliver quick racing cars.
Importance of talent for Cadillac F1
“I think probably the best way to characterise is we want to be involved in [..]. We don’t just want to be at the end of a conveyor belt when it comes to drivers because they’re so important in every form of motorsport.
“Now obviously it’s the team and the factory and the production and everything that that produces the car so, that sets the envelope as to what can be achieved.
“But then, and unless the driver has reinvented how physics works, they can’t expand that envelope, but what they can do is extract the absolute maximum from it.
“We’ve all seen situations in the past where there’s an incredibly good race car, but it’s not having the maximum extracted from it.
“So, that role of the driver is super important, and we don’t want to be at the end of a conveyor belt.
“We think that, like a lot of things that are important, it’s worth investing in […] when certainly at the time when some of the comments were made about, we set up F2 team and F3 team, that was very vaild.
“Times moved on, we can’t control who might be selling the team or not selling the team or whatever, and so it’s probably best to steer away from that kind of thought.“
Lowdon on investing in the future
While running an F2 or F3 team is currently not in the cards for Cadillac F1, Graeme Lowdon notes the importance of building up talent from drivers to engineers to everyone involved in the project.
“I think the key thing is we do want to get involved in investing in the future and ensuring that we’re involved in building all sorts of talent and not just drivers.
“It’s one of the objectives that we have within the team itself is that every single employee has a training plan.
“We want to improve everybody’s capabilities and abilities, whether it’s young drivers or young engineers or indeed, even myself as an old, old haggard executive.
“We want to invest in improvement and training, and I guess, when people talk about academies, that’s what it is.
“There is no point just traipsing people around and kind of giving them a bit of a hint on how something’s meant to be doing.
“If we’re going to invest in something, we want it to be really meaningful.
“As we mentioned before, we’ve got real ambitions.
“We’ve got a realistic approach, but real ambition and if you have real ambition then you need to invest whether that’s in facilities or people or whatever.
“And when it comes to people, then it’s right across the board from graduate engineers to Formula One drivers. So yeah, that’s what we want to do.”
