Cadillac has been confirmed as an official entrant for the F1 2026 season yesterday.
The American team’s journey to the grid was backed by automotive giants General Motors and TWG Motorsports. They secured an agreement in principle with Formula 1 in November 2024.
Preparing for the competition
Cadillac F1 has a facility near Silverstone and currently finishing the building of its main headquarters in Fishers, Indianapolis, United States.
GM and TWG Motorsports are building a power unit facility near Charlotte, North Carolina, which would make the Cadillac team a full-works operation.
Ferrari will supply the team with a power unit and a gearbox before they are ready to use their manufactured engines.
Lowdon is comfortable with Cadillac’s current position
Team Principal Graeme Lowdon said to the official F1 website the team’s race readiness is looking well and is on schedule. The Briton wants his team to be as competitive as possible from the beginning. Lowdon was the sporting director and CEO of the Virgin/Marussia F1 team until the end of the 2015 F1 season. Now, he is given the leadership mantle to lead Cadillac to the front.
“In terms of being ready to race, everything is on schedule. We don’t just want to turn up and race, we want to be as competitive as we possibly can be.
“From that point of view, for sure we would have loved to have had more time and more people because the more of that you have, the more performance you can build in. But we recognised that the process itself requires a huge amount of energy and effort.“
Production time
Lowdon said the team allocated plenty of time for testing and validating individual components. Despite an “awful lot” of work in the background, he admits that Cadillac F1 is in a significantly better position now.
“In terms of timeline for production, we’re happy with where that stands. We’ve been using a lot of time up to now doing a lot of testing and validation of individual components, things like testing of noses, squeeze testing of chassis elements, and the like.
“There’s an awful lot of work that has gone on in the background. There’s still a lot of work to do. We’re in a significantly better position now that we’re now a fully-fledged F1 team. We will have access to all the data and information that all the other teams have.
“Now we can really push to come up with the most competitive car that we can. The team is already very sizeable, we’re very comfortable about the position we’re in, in terms of being ready to go racing in 2026.“
Mass recruitment incoming
Cadillac F1 beomes the first American team to join the grid since Haas in 2016. It would be a matter of time before the team advertised new roles to ramp up their preparations.
The team already has more than 200 staff in their ranks, including former Renault technical specialists Nick Chester and Pat Symonds. However, they will need hundreds more to get on par with their rivals, many of which boast around 1000 employees.
Lowdon said he is proud to be working with Chester and Symonds due to their knowledge and experience. He acknowledged the team’s need to hire youth and those who are experienced.
“F1 is such a unique form of motorsport, so having people onboard [like Symonds and Chester] with the depth of knowledge and experience is great. They are also great people to go racing with [and] a lot of people on the team have worked with each other before at other teams.
“One thing I’m extremely proud of already is the team spirit within the team. We’ve all gone through this long process together but, during that, it’s allowed us to really build a team that is very much vision-driven and value-based – and it’s allowed us to build and communicate those values among everybody.
“We’re also employing some very bright young people who have never been in F1. Having experienced staff onboard is helpful in being able to bring those young people along. It’s really great to have such a breadth of experience.”
The drivers selected will be based on merit
There are plenty of rumors in the media about who will make Cadillac’s lineup. Lowdon stated that hiring the drivers will be the main priority since their entry is now official.
“There’s some very talented drivers still out there. We hadn’t been able to be in the driver market until the entry was confirmed. Now it has, we can move forward with that.
“In terms of timing, we’re not putting any timeline on driver announcements or anything like that but for sure, there will be in time.”
Lowdon explained that the team would hire drivers based “on merit”, ant an American driver could be involved at some point in the future.
“For sure we’re going to hire drivers based on merit. But as such, we see no reason why we won’t have American drivers in time.
“There’s nothing preventing a driver [from] being selected on merit and being American. I think that would be something that a lot of fans would really want to see as well.
“At the end of the day, the Cadillac Formula 1 Team is based in the US. We have an operation in the UK, but it’s headquartered in the US and it is a US team as well. I’m fairly sure that hiring on merit and having a US driver are entirely compatible objectives for the team.”
