Of the many story threads set to unfold in Melbourne this weekend, one of the most intriguing by far will be the race debut of the new Cadillac Formula 1 team. How well it performs is
To recap: It was only March 7th of last year that the team received final, formal confirmation that it had an entry for the 2026 World Championship. (To be fair, it was the previous November when the previously reluctant F1 organization indicated that the team would get the go-ahead, but even so that’s not much in the way of notice.) But Cadillac had been both brave and smart; it had plowed on for a couple of years on the basis that it would be allowed in, hiring people, finding a facility, and getting on with designing a car.
Given there was plenty of financing available and the head start the team subsequently gave itself, Cadillac is the best prepared new team since Toyota in 2001—although the big difference is that it has made its life a lot easier by not making its own power unit, although plans are underway to introduce one in 2029. The team has already had a chance to get up to speed in terms of garage organization across the three test sessions in Barcelona and Bahrain … but nothing can properly prepare you for the white-hot heat of a race weekend.
Apart from anything else, it will be the first time the team will have two cars leaving out on track at the same time. Then you have to throw in the rigid schedule—very different from testing, where a 30-minute delay before going out in the morning while a gremlin is chased is not a big issue. And the tight Melbourne pit lane on a busy race weekend, with cameras watching your every move, is a very different environment from a Bahrain test. Many of the crew members are battled-hardened veterans drawn from up and down the pits, but nevertheless, getting everyone on the same page and working as one is not the work of a moment. That will come into play, especially in high-pressure situations as qualifying.
The good news is, those test sessions unfolded without undue drama. Crucially the car was relatively reliable, apart from the inevitable glitches with sensors and the like that can even trip up experienced teams when the roll out new cars. The car we now know as MAC-26—a designation that honors Mario Andretti – did a decent amount of laps. It was also ready to run on time, unlike Williams and Aston Martin.
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And crucially, as Ferrari and Haas proved, Maranello’s new power unit is pretty solid. While lap times were unspectacular, they were decent—and even at the first race there should be more to come, as testing was all about the big picture rather than going for lap times. The expectation is that the team will be 10th fastest initially, ahead of the troubled Aston.
Melbourne will be a huge weekend for team principal Graeme Lowdon, the man who made the whole thing happen and put the pieces together for owner Dan Towriss. Lowdon has been through this before back in 2010 as the right-hand man of John Booth, whose Manor/Virgin team was one of three that joined the F1 field that year, along with HRT and the reborn Lotus. All were gone within a few years—a reflection of how hard it is to do it without the right investment. Given the GM and TWG budget, it’s a very different story this time around. And as a manufacturer-backed team, the ambitions are much bigger.
It was Lowdon who had the faith that it would all come right in the end and who guided the team through the entry process with the FIA and F1, one made more complex because it straddled a new Concorde Agreement. There were times when from the outside it looked like he wouldn’t succeed, but to his great credit, he did. “I think the overriding emotion was actually relief,” he says when asked by Road & Track about the final confirmation. “I think the process was clearly unprecedented, and obviously incredibly thorough on so many fronts. It was really a very stressful time, actually, for everybody involved, because it was impossible to know what the timelines were. There was a lot of relief when we finally got our entry.”
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He insists that he had faith that it would work out in the end: “I always had 100 percent confidence because we believed completely in the package that we put forward, both technically and commercially, and the ability to build a world-class F1 team. But until you actually get the entry confirmed, there’s uncertainty. And uncertainty breeds stress, frankly.”
It’s easy to forget now how many hurdles were put in the way, and how Liberty Media and the F1 organization had so little interest in the original bid under the Andretti name. Lowdon and Towriss were basically told to go away and find an OEM—and they did. Even then there was some skepticism on F1’s part in terms of the true extent of GM’s involvement. In the end, it worked out. “When the entry was announced, we wrote in a good old-fashioned pen and paper way to all of the employees, thanking them for their commitment,” says Lowdon. “They put their trust in us. And we want to repay that. History has shown that they were very good judges of the position, because obviously we got the entry. But it’s not something that we took for granted, that trust that they put in us.”
Today, F1 couldn’t be happier to have another manufacturer involved, with the Super Bowl ad and Times Square promotional event just a taste of what the Detroit giant can bring in terms of marketing reach. And there’s more to come. The U.S. facility in Fishers, IN will eventually be home to much of the manufacturing that is currently outsourced, while the Cadillac PU project will take away any lingering doubts that this is a badge engineering exercise like the one conducted by Alfa Romeo with Sauber. As time goes by, this will become more and more of a genuinely American—and genuinely GM—project.
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As for the Australian GP, a clean weekend for Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas with no damage and no lost track time would be a dream start. Given the usual high attrition rate in Melbourne and the impact that a good strategy call can have under a safety car, a finish in the points is by no means impossible, and in Perez and Bottas the team has two drivers who will take any opportunity. If one of them can make the top 10, it will be quite an achievement.
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