Cadillac tap into NASA lessons ahead of 2026 Formula 1 foray

“On the wall of every office that we have is a countdown clock,” Cadillac F1 team principal Graeme Lowdon told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It’s counting down to two things.”

One is the first “fire-up” of the car with its engine, and the other is free practice at Cadillac’s first official F1 session in Melbourne, Australia, in March next year.

It will mark the start of a new mission for General Motors, and the end of a long process to join F1 which included years of negotiations, a change of name and leadership, and even a U.S. Justice Department investigation. As a British racing boss creating an American team, Lowdon describes himself as an “inverse Ted Lasso,” the fictional U.S. soccer coach in London.

Hired in part for his experience navigating the sport’s complex approval process for new teams, Lowdon says he has worked hard to adapt to U.S. racing culture for a team that will build its cars in Fishers, Indiana.

There is also a design and manufacturing site near the British Grand Prix track at Silverstone, but Cadillac is committed to the vision of running an “American team,” Lowdon said: “The idea is to get as many different perspectives on designing a race car as possible. Formula 1 is a very creative business. With diversity of thought comes innovation and hopefully lap time.”

Past attempts to operate an F1 team outside the sport’s traditional bases in England and Italy have rarely succeeded. Cadillac, however, is looking to the 1960s space race for inspiration.

Rather than study previous racing failures, Lowdon examined non-F1 projects: "With immovable deadlines, huge amount of public scrutiny, multiple sites, and highly technical. The best example I could find were the Apollo missions.”

“I looked a lot into how NASA had done the management structure of the business. I thought there were some very clever things that they did that we could build into a new design of a Formula 1 team, a complete new way of managing it. The primary objective was to maximise peer-to-peer communication between engineers.”

F1’s other American team, Haas, is far more reliant on Europe. Its headquarters are in North Carolina but the team is largely based in Britain and designs its cars in Italy.

While existing teams have their race drivers heavily involved in the design of 2026 cars, Lowdon said the fact that Cadillac hasn’t confirmed its drivers should not be seen as a setback. There are “three or four” names on Cadillac’s shortlist midway through the 2025 season.

Lowdon believes Cadillac has more leverage in contract talks than usual: “Because we’re out of sync with the other teams, we’re not under the same time pressure. No driver is sitting there saying, ‘Oh yeah, Aston Martin are going to sign me next week,’ if you don’t sign them.”

The new team could provide a way back to F1 for drivers such as Sergio Perez, Valtteri Bottas or Zhou Guanyu, who all lost their race seats for 2025. There has also been speculation about Americans and former F1 drivers, including Mick Schumacher.

Bottas, a 10-time race winner with Mercedes, joked about the rush to sign for Cadillac in a viral video on social media, remarking on the “nice seat” in a Cadillac SUV.

Lowdon responded: “I’ve known him for a long time. I know his sense of humor, I appreciate his sense of humor, and he’s got a big fan following. My phone got super busy almost immediately when Cadillac’s F1 entry was confirmed. It was very clear that everyone wants to drive a Cadillac and so I guess Valtteri has just made it even more clear.”