While Fishers in Indiana is going to become the headquarters of the new Cadillac Formula 1 team, the huge facility is still under construction.
So too is the power unit department that General Motors and the team hopes to have operational and delivering a works engine by the end of the decade. And obviously the team’s first car is also under development in preparation for Cadillac’s 2026 debut.
Delivering that car is no easy task for any of the existing 10 teams on the grid, but to do so while building an entire constructor from scratch is another matter entirely.
Save for a logo launch event in Miami, Cadillac has been relatively quiet since getting its entry confirmed in early March. And it could choose to remain that way until it has everything it needs up and running operationally and can show off a complete team to the world.
Instead, team principal Graeme Lowdon decided to open the doors to its UK base to reveal the conditions it is currently operating under, because – to paraphrase his own words – an F1 team only starts up once.
This was not a tour designed to impress. Not in terms of the aesthetics, anyway. The Silverstone facility is part of the wider Silverstone Park development, with six different buildings across the industrial estate being utilized by Cadillac in various ways. These are not buildings that are next to each other, either, with a short walk required between the majority.
Eventually, the number will be reduced to four permanent buildings, with the three main ones being the UK Technical Center, the UK Production Center and the UK Logistics Center. But with the need to juggle different projects – including the conversion of the only Cadillac-owned space at this point – a number of the current six have been secured on a ten-year lease that are fulfilling other roles than they finally will moving forward.
“I was presented with … how do you build a Formula 1 team? A works level Formula 1 team from scratch, but you don’t know if you’ve got an entry or not?” Lowdon says of the starting point.
“Like most things, it starts with the people. So, I made a list of key people that were needed to get on board really, really quick … And it kind of starts from there.
“Then it branches out from there as well because as those people get on board, you’re constantly making sure you’ve got this balancing act of all the assets that they need. There’s no point having 400 people if we’ve got no IT department that’s geared up to care for them.
“And there’s no point having 400 people if you haven’t got enough buildings. And we need more buildings because the actual buildings that we bought are going to be building sites for 12 months. So, you end up in this juggling act, but it all starts with the people.
“Every high-performance team, everything starts, ends, middle bit – everything is about just getting good people.”
On top of the people, though, there’s also been the need to build up the entire infrastructure. Lowdon estimates it would take two and a half years to put the entire team together if work started at the moment the entry was granted. And that’s before you started actually building the car.
That lead time is so long that the entry approval would time out, so Cadillac had to take the risk by starting work prior to having its place on the grid confirmed.

Now 116 days from that confirmation, it means around 400 people have been hired, 10,000 components have already been made – including the first 2026 chassis that has passed its crash tests – and 6,000 purchase orders issued.
In the week before the visit, 30 new suppliers had been onboarded, while there have been five petabytes of CFD data generated and stored in IT infrastructure that also previously didn’t exist.