While Fishers in Indiana is going to become the headquarters of the new Cadillac Formula 1 team, the huge facility is still under construction.
So too is the power unit department that General Motors and the team hopes to have operational and delivering a works engine by the end of the decade. And obviously the team’s first car is also under development in preparation for Cadillac’s 2026 debut.
Delivering that car is no easy task for any of the existing 10 teams on the grid, but to do so while building an entire constructor from scratch is another matter entirely.
Save for a logo launch event in Miami, Cadillac has been relatively quiet since getting its entry confirmed in early March. And it could choose to remain that way until it has everything it needs up and running operationally and can show off a complete team to the world.
Instead, team principal Graeme Lowdon decided to open the doors to its UK base to reveal the conditions it is currently operating under, because – to paraphrase his own words – an F1 team only starts up once.
This was not a tour designed to impress. Not in terms of the aesthetics, anyway. The Silverstone facility is part of the wider Silverstone Park development, with six different buildings across the industrial estate being utilized by Cadillac in various ways. These are not buildings that are next to each other, either, with a short walk required between the majority.
Eventually, the number will be reduced to four permanent buildings, with the three main ones being the UK Technical Center, the UK Production Center and the UK Logistics Center. But with the need to juggle different projects – including the conversion of the only Cadillac-owned space at this point – a number of the current six have been secured on a ten-year lease that are fulfilling other roles than they finally will moving forward.
“I was presented with … how do you build a Formula 1 team? A works level Formula 1 team from scratch, but you don’t know if you’ve got an entry or not?” Lowdon says of the starting point.
“Like most things, it starts with the people. So, I made a list of key people that were needed to get on board really, really quick … And it kind of starts from there.
“Then it branches out from there as well because as those people get on board, you’re constantly making sure you’ve got this balancing act of all the assets that they need. There’s no point having 400 people if we’ve got no IT department that’s geared up to care for them.
“And there’s no point having 400 people if you haven’t got enough buildings. And we need more buildings because the actual buildings that we bought are going to be building sites for 12 months. So, you end up in this juggling act, but it all starts with the people.
“Every high-performance team, everything starts, ends, middle bit – everything is about just getting good people.”
On top of the people, though, there’s also been the need to build up the entire infrastructure. Lowdon estimates it would take two and a half years to put the entire team together if work started at the moment the entry was granted. And that’s before you started actually building the car.
That lead time is so long that the entry approval would time out, so Cadillac had to take the risk by starting work prior to having its place on the grid confirmed.
Now 116 days from that confirmation, it means around 400 people have been hired, 10,000 components have already been made – including the first 2026 chassis that has passed its crash tests – and 6,000 purchase orders issued.
In the week before the visit, 30 new suppliers had been onboarded, while there have been five petabytes of CFD data generated and stored in IT infrastructure that also previously didn’t exist.
Doing all of that alongside modifying the buildings to be fit for purpose makes for a sense of what Lowdon describes as “musical chairs”. The future UK Logistics Center currently serves multiple purposes, also housing the model shop and the aforementioned ’26 chassis on a rig – both of which were only moved in a few days earlier.
And work in those departments is taking place on temporary hardware ahead of future relocations that will return the space to logistics. It’s a far cry from the polished homes of many of the existing teams.
Even the design office – one of the most mature departments of the team due to its early place in the car production timeline – is only adorned by televisions showing key dates and milestones that need to be hit.
A few large photos of significant past moments for various TWG Motorsports properties – such as Alexander Rossi’s Indy 500 victory – and archive Mario Andretti images are the only bits of window dressing seen in one of the small satellite buildings. This is a team that has far more to be getting on with than just making a temporary set-up look pretty.
But selling people on the project has proven to be a fruitful task, as it also offers a rare opportunity to be part of something from the very start. There’s no legacy, and no carry over, allowing Cadillac to offer a lot of responsibility for personnel to set its future course.
Pulling it together right now is one task, but also doing so across the multiple locations of Indiana, North Carolina and Michigan adds further complexity. And to make that work, Cadillac is taking a leaf out another American institution’s book.
“If you look at the task in hand, we’ve got immovable deadlines,” Lowdon explains. “We’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction. So we need engineers talking to engineers.
“We need an engineer here talking to an engineer in Charlotte and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers. And so we’ve looked to have a very, very flat management structure.
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project. It’s very similar. Okay, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes. So we’ve leaned heavily on the management structures that were used for the Apollo project.
“It’s super interesting … I don’t know if other teams have used that before.
“It’s a very, very flat management structure. So race teams are often described in military terms, where you see, even if you see a garage tour, someone will say, ‘this is organised in a kind of pyramid, and you have one person at the top’. And the typical military structure is command and control. So you issue commands, people do things.
“When it’s multi-site like this, that becomes a massive challenge. And what you can’t have is an engineer here having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just a different geographic location, but a different country altogether, and then go up and down.
“So instead, it’s a kind of a different structure where it’s mission control instead of command and control. So you have this really flat structure. Engineers are able to talk directly to each other. And the thing that’s heavily imparted on them is the mission itself.
“Everyone knows what the mission is. They know what needs to be done. They don’t have to be told, ‘go and make six bits’ or whatever.
“That’s a massive oversimplification of that hierarchy. It’s very, very flat structure. We split the business into 12 distinct offices. They all communicate with each other. And they are all totally geographically agnostic. It doesn’t matter where you sit.
“So far it works. The proof of the pudding is going to be in whether the car’s quick.”
The learnings from NASA also extend beyond the actual management structure, but also to an attitude within the team. Lowdon is extremely experienced within motorsport and F1, but does not think the plan to have so much of Cadillac eventually operate out of the United States is likely to be detrimental in the face of 10 teams based almost exclusively in the UK and Italy.
“There is this perception that Formula 1 can only take place in the UK or Europe. And, I keep thinking, there’s a lot of really super advanced engineering goes on in the US. They literally put a man on the moon, and quite some time ago, as well.
“And we found in the projects that we’ve been doing with GM already, the caliber and the standard of engineering is super, super high. So our colleagues across at GM Technical Centre in Charlotte have worked on different subsystems of the car already. and the level of engineering is extremely good.”
For the work currently ongoing back at Silverstone, much of the data and imagery on the various computer screens is familiar as Cadillac continues to develop its 2026 challenger. But the same can’t be said of the surroundings it is doing so from.
Housing a functioning Formula 1 team that is aiming to grow to at least 600 people by the time it goes racing in 250 days, while developing those very buildings themselves, is a fascinating undertaking.
“Is it the equivalent of putting a man on the moon?” Lowdon asks. Maybe not, but Cadillac has certainly been shooting for the stars for some time.
