This week ahead of the British Grand Prix, Cadillac F1 team boss Graeme Lowdon hosted journalists for a tour of the team’s new 48,000 square foot building at Silverstone Park, not far from Aston Martin’s new nearly-ten-times-as-large facility. The Cadillac team will join the grid as the 11th team in F1 when the lights go out in Australia on March 8, 2026, so the time crunch is definitely coming down to the wire. You should definitely go check out reporting from the New York Times and Racer Magazine, both of which attended the facility tour and provided great insight. According to their reporting, Cadillac has already completed its mandatory FIA crash test, and the team is just getting cracking on the design and aero work — and they’re doing it in a somewhat unorthodox fashion.
Cadillac has a team working around the clock at Toyota’s wind tunnel, and there are engineers split between twelve different offices in Europe and the U.S. In addition to this newly-finished building in the UK, there are folks with nose to grindstone at GM’s Warren, Michigan engineering building, GM Technical Center in Charlotte, and at the Andretti Global/TWG Motorsports facility in Fishers, Indiana. With a huge intercontinental cohort of racing science folks working on the car, Lowdon says “It’s highly modeled on the Apollo project, it’s very similar. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes!”
With the British facility just getting up to speed, Cadillac has to split things up right now because the team’s gigantic new Fishers headquarters is still under construction, as is the new power unit department in North Carolina. There’s more time for the NC spot to be completed, however, as Cadillac will purchase Ferrari powertrains for their F1 efforts in 2026 and 2027.
What’s it like in there?
“There is this perception that Formula 1 can only take place in the UK or Europe,” says the Caddy head honcho. “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.” With the singular exception of Haas F1, every single team on the grid in 2025 is based in Europe, and most of those are within just 50 miles of each other in the U.K.’s so-called carbon fiber triangle. It seems Cadillac is taking the Haas approach, as the other American team operates a facility in Kannapolis, North Carolina, as well as a satellite office in Banbury, England, and a design office in Maranello, Italy, as well as a partnership with Toyota operating the wind tunnel in Germany.
Unlike many teams operating with a highly siloed military-style chain of command, Lowdon and Cadillac moved to a more “mission control” approach with each department head able to communicate with each other in a “very flat” management structure. With just 247 days remaining until the car has to be on track for FP1 in Australia, there’s so much yet to be done that the team knows it can’t let bureaucracy stand in the way of. “We’ve got immovable deadlines, we’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction,” reiterates Lowdon. “So we need engineers talking to engineers.”
What happened to Andretti?
Despite all of the work already finished, Mr. Lowdon is hardly optimistic about the team’s chances in 2026. With a new team with new cars built to new regulations, he’s simply tempering expectations. That may not be the vote of confidence that the General Motors board wants to hear, but he’s effectively assuming the team will be 11th out of 11. “Can you imagine if you’ve owned the Formula One team for 10 years, and then another team pops up and beats you?” Lowdon said. “You would be apoplectic. You would be so annoyed.”
The building at Silverstone originally broke ground as Andretti Global prepared for what it hoped would be a 2025 debut back in April of 2024. Though no sign of Andretti remains on or in the building, the facility has been taken over by Andretti’s parent company TWG Motorsports. TWG is the racing arm of multi-billionaire Mark Walter’s investment holdings company TWG Global, which also owns or has stakes in NASCAR team Spire Motorsports, Australian Supercars team Walkinshaw Andretti United, and Cadillac’s factory-supported IMSA team Wayne Taylor Racing.
