Why Cadillac’s F1 boss believes they can succeed where his last team failed · RaceFans

Cadillac will be the first new Formula 1 team in a decade when it joins the grid next year.

Graeme Lowden, their team principal, understands the scale of the challenge as he has experienced it before. His most recent F1 experience was at the team known as Virgin when it entered F1 15 years ago.

Although it outlasted its fellow 2010 newcomers Lotus (later Caterham) and HRT, Lowden’s last team fell into administration at the end of 2016. Virgin went through three different identities in six years as different backers came and went.

But Cadillac will benefit enormously from the backing of US carmaking giant General Motors and input from sports group TWG, according to Lowden. “Far the biggest thing that’s been helpful is the foundations that we’ve got, these partnerships with TWG and GM,” he said in response to a question from RaceFans.

“It would be incredibly difficult to bring a team in nowadays without that kind of support. I don’t think anybody has ever made commitments both in terms of public statements and, equally important, financial commitment to a new team.

“The investment that has gone in prior to there being a confirmation of entries is really very, very impressive and is a reflection of the commitment that the shareholders have to this sport.”

The new team originally applied to enter F1 under the name Andretti. Cadillac joined the project in November 2023 and, after Formula One Management expressed doubt over the value of the Andretti brand to F1, applied its name to the project.

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Lowden says the manufacturer is fully invested in competing in F1. “It’s obviously a brand of General Motors, GM needs no introduction, but one of the things that I particularly like about the involvement of GM is this is not a ‘putting a sticker on a car’ exercise,” he said. “This is a full involvement of an incredibly technically advanced and technically aware company and it’s extremely good that we can draw upon that.”

He calls TWG a “sporting and commercial powerhouse” whose experience beyond motorsport will also benefit Cadillac. “They have a collection of interests in a very wide range of sports. Not just motorsport, but their portfolio in motorsport is pretty impressive and I think probably unprecedented, actually.

“They also have involvement and ownership in other sports as well, whether it’s NBA, Premier League, also a really wide range of sports. So there’s also insight and perspective that we can draw from there.”

Although Cadillac had to overcome significant opposition from FOM to gain its place on the grid for the 2026 F1 season, Lowden says his new team faces more favourable circumstances as it enters the series than his last one did.

Virgin’s bid to enter F1 was approved in 2009 when the series made its first attempt to introduce a cost cap. Under regulations planned for 2010, newcomers were offered some rules breaks in exchange for committing to a spending limit.

However the regulations were never approved, meaning Virgin and their fellow newcomers found themselves at an immediate competitive disadvantage. It took until 2021 for F1 to finally introduce a spending limit for teams, by which time Virgin and the rest were long gone.

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“The last time I was involved in bringing a new team in the goalposts changed hugely,” said Lowden. “It’s a matter of history now what went through.

“If you remember back to 2009, the battles to try and get something very odd back then called a ‘cost cap’, apparently just became an absolute impossibility and yet now it’s seen as a very positive thing within the sport by all the teams. So there’s been a significant change in the landscape of how you bring in a team.”

The team has already attracted several well-known names within the sport. “Very experienced people are on board like Nick Chester, Pat Symonds, and on the commercial side Caroline McGrory. These are people who’ve spent decades in Formula 1.”

Symonds was a particularly eye-catching hire, as the former F1 engineering director last worked at the series itself, framing the very technical regulations Cadillac and its rivals will compete under next year. However Lowden says that detail was secondary to the team’s interest in hiring him.

“Pat’s an incredibly valuable addition to anybody’s team,” he said. “It’s less that he was involved in the rules, it’s just he’s Pat Symonds and he knows what he’s doing and he’s got vast experience.

“I’ve been racing with him before so it wasn’t a difficult decision for me to look to go racing with Pat again because I know what he can do. Is it helpful that he understands the rule set? Yes, but I think that’s outweighed by just the fact that he’s good at what he does.”

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Given his experience of working for a new team in the past, Lowden is understandably reluctant to set goals, but stresses that “getting on the grid, for us that just has to be a given.”

“We just have to be there and we want to push as hard as we can,” he said. “But it is incredibly difficult to set expectations for a new team for a whole bunch of reasons.

“Yes, we’ve got a lot of experienced people. But also a team operates through a highly complex network of processes and what we don’t yet have – and no new team ever does have – is any kind of validation of the processes themselves.

“A good example would be: yes, we’re very active in the wind tunnel at the moment, but we can’t correlate what the wind tunnel does with the track because we’re not racing. And you can’t just go and race a Formula 1 car on your own, it’s just not allowed under the rules.

“So it’s very, very difficult to set expectations other than in terms of what we are in control of. That [means] delivering the car that we want, on time, with the group of people that we want. All of those things, we hold ourselves to really, really high standards. But in terms of measuring ourselves against others, I think it’s even more complicated than normal.”

However he insists the team will not be satisfied to just make up the numbers. “The ambition […] is limitless,” he said. “Just being part of Formula 1 is not the objective. We do want to be a meaningful part of the competition, but we recognise that that can take time.”

Compared to what he’s experienced before in F1, Lowden believes he has a much better chance of success this time. “In terms of my experience bringing teams in, I’ve never been involved in something that’s so well-structured and so well-backed and so well-funded as well,” he said. “That certainly changes the landscape completely. Not just a little bit: Completely.”

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