F1 News: Lowdon gives an update on Cadillac's F1 progress

In this interview, Cadillac F1 Team Principal Graeme Lowdon sat down with Autosport’s Ben Hunt to discuss how the team is going about getting ready to join the F1 grid in 2026

In a one-on-one interview, Motorsport.com Editor-In-Chief Ben Hunt sits down with Team Principal of the Cadillac F1 Team; Graeme Lowdon, to check in their progress with their debut race less than 250 days away.

In the interview, Graeme talks about why he’s championing diversity as the builds the infrastructure of the team, the two-year long application process to get on the grid, what General Motors are bringing to the table on and off the track, and a hint as to their approach in selecting drivers, with their 2026 lineup still up in the air.

Graeme Lowdon, Cadillac F1 team principal talks to reporters Photographer: Cadillac Communications

“This is an American team. Our head office is in Fishers, Indianapolis. What you’ve seen here in Silverstone is kind of the nuts and bolts of what you need to do to get on the grid,” Lowdon told Autosport.

“But there is a whole other dimension to the team that we’re obviously excited to tell you about at the right time in the US.

“The biggest challenge in building any team or the most important element of any team, of course, is the people. I mentioned before we’re 109 days into this process. We’ve got another 250 something to the first race. So we’re around about a third of the way through already. Yet we’ve got around about 67 percent of the team members in place.

“So in terms of the number of people to actually go racing with a team like that, you need around about 600 people by the time you go to the first race. We’re currently around about two-thirds of the way there, which probably means we’re not the smallest team on the F1 grid at the minute.”

“We’re in six buildings here that will eventually condense to four buildings and really three prime ones,” he said. “The UK Technical Centre, the UK Production Centre, and the UK Logistics Centre. They’re the three key buildings here, and there’ll be a small machine shop as well. We’ve already issued somewhere in the region of 6,000 drawings and made 10,000 components already.

Cadillac F1 work shop front door. Photographer: Cadillac Communications

“Fishers will be our manufacturing site over time, but it takes a long time to do that,” added Lowdon to Autosport. “We have to build the building, we have to put the machines in, we have to hire the people, we have to train the people.

“So we rely heavily on third-party suppliers. And to give you an idea, this week we onboarded 30 new suppliers and that’s the kind of cadence that’s needed. It’s a huge task in just supplier management. And then we’re looking over time to internalize a lot of that manufacturing.

“On the IT side, we’ve issued 425 laptops. That might sound really insignificant, but an established team will just do refreshes. When you’re doing that kind of volume in one hit, it’s very impressive to see some of this happen.

“And in IT alone, they’ve issued 6,000 purchase orders, just from the IT department. And they’re currently storing 5 petabytes of CFD data, which is 5,000 million bits of information on the CFD side.

“You have to remember they’re storing that in infrastructure that didn’t exist, so you have to build that. And it’s done by people who weren’t here, because we’ve had to hire them as well.”