But backing from a major car manufacturer comes freighted with expectations. Alpine<\/a> has had a vigorous appetite for team principals since Renault acquired the team a decade ago, while Audi<\/a> ejected one set of management before it even applied its logo to the car.<\/p>\n Porsche backed out of an engine-development deal with Red Bull because it wanted equity the energy drink manufacturer wasn\u2019t willing to release. Further back in time, BMW and Honda bought teams but didn\u2019t have the corporate stamina to stick the course through the lean years. Toyota seemed to think it would start winning grands prix almost straight away and then spent the rest of its time in F1 wondering why it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n At the turn of the millennium, Ford bought a team which had won races \u2013 Stewart Grand Prix \u2013 and contrived to spend a lot of money while making it a much less successful organisation. That farrago above all was an object lesson in not letting the corporate suits get involved in motor racing, because they generally don\u2019t understand how it works.<\/p>\n The Cadillac F1 team<\/a> differs from all of those except Toyota in that it is a start-up operation, and its immediate corporate master is TWG Global, a business conglomerate run by Dan Towriss, who made his money in finance but has proved to be an astute custodian of the racing brands he owns. A lot of the senior technical leadership are formerly of \u2018Team Enstone\u2019 but, although there is a huge accumulation of individual experience, this is still new as a group.<\/p>\n Jarno Trulli, Toyota TF109<\/p>\n Photo by: Steven Tee \/ Motorsport Images<\/p>\n Team principal Graeme Lowdon describes the second quarter of this year as a kind of stress test of that organisation, now that the actual racing has begun.<\/p>\n \u201cWe like to say every day is a school day,\u201d he told select media including Autosport. \u201cIf it’s a day where we haven’t learned something, it’s a day we’ve wasted. And so we’re just trying to find every area that we can improve and constantly, constantly improve.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd at the minute it’s big chunks because there’s just so much to do and there’s so much that’s new as well. So we’re somewhere off that area where you’re just refining things, where I think a lot of the other teams are probably more in that mode.\u201d<\/p>\n Asked to put a timeline on when Cadillac might reach that point, Lowdon drew an interesting comparison.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it takes years actually,\u201d he said. \u201cYou guys have seen this game for a long time. The common thing in all of the successful teams is stability.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could argue, what was it that made John Todt so successful at Ferrari? It was probably the five or six years of, I don’t know what you would call it, but it wasn’t winning. But it was stability and it was building and building and building.<\/p>\n \u201cSame at McLaren<\/a>. You pick your team, you run with it and it takes time because it’s so complicated.<\/p>\n \u201cI’ve got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and some of the reports I read ahead of a grand prix really stretch my understanding of aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and heat transfer and God knows what else. It’s super, super complex. And then on top of all of that is the operational systems and everything, not just pitstops and stuff, but also strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n Graeme Lowdon, Team Principal of Cadillac F1 Team<\/p>\n Photo by: Alastair Staley \/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n Attributing these other successes to stability may seem like an oversimplification. But indubitably one common denominator between Ferrari under Jean Todt and McLaren under Andrea Stella is that both of them have been given the freedom to reshape the team structure and culture by a senior figure who has bought into that vision \u2013 and who will defend it when interrogated by those further up the food chain.<\/p>\n In\u00a0Todt\u2019s case it was Luca di Montezemolo, who headhunted him from Peugeot in late 1993 when the French automotive giant abruptly cancelled its plans to enter F1 as a constructor. With Stella the executive shield is Zak Brown, who promoted him into his current position.<\/p>\n Todt inherited an insanely dysfunctional business and there would be three more seasons of scratching around for results before Michael Schumacher<\/a> challenged Jacques Villeneuve<\/a> for the drivers\u2019 championship until the last round of the season in 1997. Then another two before Ferrari won its first constructors\u2019 championship since 1983.<\/p>\n So, Ferrari being Ferrari,\u00a0Todt spent his first three years under permanent threat of being fired \u2013 according to the Italian media. Among the more peculiar elements of the structure he inherited was that the car was being designed in the UK, and the blueprints faxed over to Maranello page by page for construction and assembly.<\/p>\n This is because Ferrari, on\u00a0Niki Lauda\u2019s advice, had brought legendary designer John Barnard back on board in the hope of fast-tracking the team back to competitiveness. But it was so desperate to retain Barnard\u2019s services that it had granted all his demands, including his requirement to stay in the UK and establish a design office there.<\/p>\n Famously, Barnard liked to drive home for lunch.<\/p>\n Niki Lauda and John Barnard at the 1994 Brazilian GP<\/p>\n Photo by: Ercole Colombo<\/p>\n The Barnard Ferraris of the mid-1990s did deliver a performance uplift but the shortcomings of designing the car at one site and building it several hundred miles away were obvious. On the early version of the 1994 412T1, for instance, a miscommunication between Barnard\u2019s team and the engine department about the requirements for the cooling architecture led to the car struggling until a B-spec was introduced mid-season.<\/p>\n Todt\u2019s solution, having poached Schumacher to drive in 1996, was to recruit the design leaders who had masterminded the cars Michael had driven to his first two world championships. Under technical director Ross Brawn, design and manufacture was brought back under one roof but this, naturally, took more time \u2013 as did the cultural changes Brawn pushed through.<\/p>\n Brawn transformed a working culture riven by silos, Machiavellian blame machinations, and an addiction to quick fixes. This proved controversial but he was, in effect, double firewalled \u2013 by Todt and, by extension, Montezemolo.<\/p>\n Bringing in an outsider was politically difficult. It\u2019s said that Todt came home one day to find his house had been broken into and a pair of scissors left on his bed.<\/p>\n Naturally much of this negative sentiment fell away as the new culture delivered five consecutive drivers\u2019 championships and six constructors\u2019 titles. Many of the lessons from this era were imprinted upon a young Stella, then a performance engineer at the Scuderia.<\/p>\n At McLaren, Stella \u2013 with Brown\u2019s blessing \u2013 restructured the engineering organisation away from the traditional hierarchy of one technical director overseeing everything. Now there are three strands, each with its own director: aerodynamics, performance, and design and engineering.<\/p>\n Lando Norris, McLaren, Andrea Stella, McLaren, Zak Brown, McLaren<\/p>\n Photo by: Steven Tee \/ LAT Images via Getty Images<\/p>\n Most significantly, Stella did this while eschewing the traditional merry-go-round of hirings and firings. There has been some recruiting, such as Rob Marshall from Red Bull, but for the most part it has been a case of using the same pool of people in a way which better enables them to fulfil their potential.<\/p>\n Like Brawn, Stella is an advocate of responsibility rather than blame, and of finding performance through incremental gains.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we succeed today,\u201d he told Autosport recently, \u201cI want everyone at the factory to feel, ‘This is something I own. This is something I earned. This is something I helped create.’<\/p>\n \u201cThat sense of shared contribution is incredibly powerful. Helping people recognise the value of their own work, and see how it connects to what happens on track, is one of the things that makes this team so special to me.\u201d<\/p>\n So stability over time, as Lowdon said, is one contributor to building a successful organisation.\u00a0<\/p>\n But so too is culture, which is why some teams never get there.<\/p>\n Read Also:<\/p>\n We want to hear from you!<\/p>\n Let us know what you would like to see from us in the future.<\/p>\n![\"Jarno](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/jarno-trulli-toyota-tf109-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Graeme](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/graeme-lowdon-team-principal-o.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Niki](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/gettyimages-2159119178.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Lando](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/lando-norris-mclaren-andrea-st.jpg\")
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