Tick-tock.
Before its drivers first saw the chequered flag, before the first practice lap, before even the first engine fire-up, there was the sound of a ticking clock at Cadillac’s Silverstone factory.
This is the sound of a Formula 1 team in gestation. While established constructors live by the stopwatch, Cadillac’s entire existence was conducted by a countdown timer ticking down to the fledgling team’s first official grand prix session: first practice at the Australian Grand Prix.
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“The biggest challenge is always time,” Cadillac principal Graeme Lowdon tells Fox Sports. “Time is your enemy when you’re trying to set something like this up.”
To say the Cadillac team was simply being ‘set up’ is something of an understatement.
New Formula 1 teams don’t come around very often, and even rarer are those built completely from the ground up rather than from the ashes of a collapsed predecessor.
When Cadillac — previously the F1 bid headed by Michael Andretti — was conceived, nothing existed.
Many elements in Formula 1 would have preferred it stayed that way.
Much of the sport was closed to the prospect of an 11th team. Some baulked at the reduced earnings from having the prize pot split between more players. Others surely feared that they might find themselves eventually demoted on the championship table.
Despite initial FIA approval in 2023, Formula 1 vetoed the bid, denying entry to the world’s highest profile racing category.
The crisis triggered a reorganisation that saw Andretti step back and long-time sponsor TWG take over the team alongside General Motors, which confirmed it would commit to building its own engines as a full works entry.
It wasn’t until the end of 2024 the American team gained in-principle approval to join the sport. Its entry was granted in March 2025, less than a year before its 2026 Melbourne debut.
“Because the entry process that we went through, as everyone knows, was quite lengthy — to say the least — there were all sorts of hurdles,” he says.
“You don’t actually get access to everything that a Formula 1 team needs until you are actually a Formula 1 team. You can download the sporting regulations and technical regulations from the internet — any fan can do that — but they’re backed up by hundreds and hundreds of pages of technical directives and determination documents and all sorts of stuff. We couldn’t have access to any of that.
“We couldn’t have access to any of the common-source component designs. We couldn’t get any wind tunnel tyres, because you can only get wind tunnel tyres if you’re a Formula 1 team.
“Although we did a lot of planning and a lot of preparation, the reality is you can’t really start in earnest until you’ve actually got that entry, and we got that pretty late in the whole day.
“That was the biggest challenge by far, time.”
PIT TALK PODCAST: Michael and Matt catch up with Cadillac boss Graeme Lowdon to debrief the first three grands prix in the history of General Motors, check in on his drivers — plus test driver Colton Herta — and ask him where it’s all going. Watch the interview on YouTube >.
NO EASY TASK
The Cadillac concept on its own is ambitious: a trans-Atlantic team owned and administered across two campuses in the United States with a factory in the UK representing one of the world’s largest auto manufacturers.
Adding in the compressed timeline amped up the already sky-high difficulty considerably.
Once the entry hit Lowdon’s inbox, the countdown to Melbourne was on.
“Right from the very start we put countdown clocks on the walls of every office counting down to FP1 in Melbourne,” he says.
“A year sounds a long time, but … we didn’t just have to get these cars on track in time for a shakedown (at pre-season testing); you’ve got to build them, and before you build them, you’ve got to manufacture all the bits, and before you manufacture the bits, you’ve got to design them, and before you design them, you’ve got hire the people to design them and then you’ve got to put in place all of the systems — the (computer-aided design) systems, the (enterprise resource planning) systems — everything that a modern manufacturing company needs.
“We’re doing that across two continents as well. We’re building factories in Indianapolis in Indiana, in Charlotte in North Carolina and then also at Silverstone as well.
“When you take a step back and look at it, the biggest challenge is definitely time.”
And really the deadline was tighter than the ever-ticking clocks suggested. Formula 1’s first pre-season test in Barcelona was in January, almost six weeks before Melbourne, and Cadillac committed to its first private shakedown more than a week before that.
The improbability of Cadillac’s task — under sweeping new chassis and engine regulations to boot — is what had many observers suggesting the team’s first season would be disastrous.
Some believed the team would struggle to meet the rarely mentioned 107 per cent rule, the regulation that prevents cars from taking part in a grand prix if they’re too slow in qualifying.
If an outright lack of speed didn’t get it, reliability surely would finish the job in the most complex regulatory era in Formula 1 history.
What’s transpired though, is something completely different.
At all three pre-season tests Cadillac avoided last place in the mileage tally. Both cars qualified easily for the Australian Grand Prix. Though only one car saw the chequered flag in Melbourne, both finished the subsequent two races in China and Japan.
Remarkably the team has hauled itself off the bottom of the championship table. That’s thanks of course to Aston Martin’s catastrophic start to the season, but then that’s exactly the point — whereas a longstanding and cashed-up team with state-of-the-art, fully constructed facilities has been tripped up in 2026, Cadillac looks established beyond its years.
“I think you can see from what’s happened with some of the other teams, the regulation set is super difficult,” Lowdon says. “Formula 1 is super difficult.
“Some teams are struggling to start grands prix, let alone finish them.
“My own view is that the whole team has done a spectacular job, actually.
“It’s not easy to go from literally what we had, which was an empty room and a set of regulations, to building a Formula 1 team to competing against the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes and McLaren.
“These teams that have been doing it for a huge amount of time. Even the newest team prior to us on the on the grid (Haas) have been there for at least a decade or so. It’s not an easy task at all.
“Performance-wise we’re not completely at the back, so from that point of view it’s encouraging.”
Culture is key.
At the helm of a brand-new team, Lowdon has had the chance to set the tone — and as someone who’s spent years in top-line motorsport, including in Formula 1, he understood the challenge of building up competitive outfit in a competitive and highly specialised environment.
“Formula 1 is the greatest team sport in the world, that’s my view,” he explains. “All team sports are about people, so the biggest asset on your side is building that team of people.
“What we tried to do from the very start is get the very best people that we can.
“We want the team to be the team that everybody wants to join and nobody wants to leave and everyone’s proud to be part of, and I genuinely believe that that’s part of the achievement that we’ve got.
“Then it’s just been a lot of late nights and all nights and early starts and everything else because, as I said before, time is the biggest penalty.”
AMERICA’S NEW HOME TEAM
It puts Cadillac in a perhaps unexpected position ahead of this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix.
This was always going to be its first home race, but after the first three grands prix it will arrive not as a flailing start-up asking for patience but as a respectable new team earning its stripes.
It’s the dream scenario for both the Cadillac brand and for Formula 1.
Cadillac the first General Motors marque ever to be involved in F1, and though it lacks an in-house engine now, GM has committed to fielding its own power unit by the end of the decade to turn the team into a fully fledged works entry.
It’s a boon for F1’s mission to solidify its place in the American sporting landscape.
The United States was a previously undercapitalised market for Formula 1, which spent stretches without so much as a grand prix in the country.
Liberty Media’s takeover almost a decade ago patched up Formula 1’s relationship with the USA as a matter of priority. The US boasts three grands prix: the perennially sold-out races in Austin and Miami and its showpiece race in Las Vegas.
American interest is growing rapidly, but the sport is acutely aware that the final step in concreting its hold in the world’s biggest consumer market is US representation.
Cadillac — an all-American brand with a motorsport history — could bridge the gap.
Lowdon says the power of the GM brand was evident even before one of his cars first turned a wheel this season.
“Something happened last year which really kind of woke me up to it a little bit,” he says. “I’ve been going to grands prix in various roles for quite some time now, and most of the time you slip into the paddock, slip out and nobody notices.
“But in Austin last year I got stopped constantly on the street by American Formula 1 fans, who were very, very proud to say that they could support Cadillac and they were looking forward to it.
“I’m not American, but that doesn’t really matter. What the fans are interested in is this fantastic brand which has not only got a very long history of innovation and the like but also racing.
“Real race fans understand that GM has been involved in racing for a long time in a lot of different series, and they’re very loyal to the series that they go into.
“There’s just this whole swath of fans who are really excited. That was the thing that came across to me — I just met a lot of excited F1 fans or people who were going to be F1 fans because they feel that they had a brand that they can identify with and support.
“That was a bit of a wake-up moment for me because I guess we’d just been head down looking at clocks on the wall.
“It was brilliant to have that feedback, and I genuinely think in Miami we’ll see more of that.”
THE DEADLINES NEVER STOP
The April break, between the Japanese and Miami grands prix, was a welcome one for Lowdon as he sat down to speak with Fox Sports.
The start of the season — the previous 12 months in fact — had been a rush just to bring Cadillac to life. Four successive weekends without racing allowed for a certain amount of reflection on the project’s early days.
Cadillac has been cautious not to set itself targets this year. Part of it is pure pragmatism under new rules that had the potential to massively shake up the pecking order, but a more significant component was expectation management. Even if Lowdon had been optimistic the team could start on a respectable footing, the line between decent and dire was unknowably thin.
“You never really know where you’re going to be in terms of performance, because it is a relative game,” he says. “We could invent what we think is an absolutely fabulous car and then find out that 10 other teams have done an even better job.
“But if someone had said in advance that we are well inside the 107, which is kind of the benchmark for where a team from a standing start could end up…
“What we did say was that we have huge respect for the other teams. I’ve worked with many of them. I’ve certainly worked with a lot of people in them, and I have massive respect for those people.
“Our first target was to gain the respect of our competitors, and I genuinely think we’ve done that already with the way that we’ve turned up and the performance of the car and the attitude to the sporting side and everything else.
“I’d like to think that we’ve either achieved or are well on our way to achieving that.”
But a decent start and respect from rivals doesn’t mean much in Formula 1. Cadillac isn’t investing in the team to qualify respectably in Q1 or finish commendably out of the points. The honourable loss is a myth when there are hundreds of millions of dollars at play.
“The key thing for us now is how we progress as opposed to where we started,” Lowdon says. “That was really what we emphasised with the owners, with the people who’ve really invested the time and effort and money and resource in the team, is to really look at how we go from here.
“It’s important that we demonstrate forward momentum. This is a difficult game. Nobody stands still in Formula 1.”
Cadillac’s renowned omnipresent countdown clocks struck zero on the Friday of the Australian Grand Prix, the first official day of the season.
“Chris Green, our head of IT, actually had a small version of the countdown clock in the garage in Melbourne, and it ticked the seconds down to the start of FP1, and I thought that was actually quite cool, because we’d spent weeks and months and days looking at these countdown clocks,” Lowdon says.
But the pressure of time never ceases in Formula 1.
“We always made it clear that the destination for us wasn’t just being at the first race. It’s building the whole team and moving beyond that.
“Most of (the clocks) were embedded in TV screens, which now show some other deadline.”
Cadillac’s clock keeps ticking. Tick-tock.