Cadillac will become Formula 1’s 11th team in 2026. On Tuesday they confirmed the experienced duo of Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their driver line-up for next season. But what else do we know about the new kids on the grid?
Backed by General Motors, the American car manufacturer, and TWG Global, which has links to Chelsea FC, Cadillac will initially use a Ferrari engine, before making their own from 2029. Their entry process took a total of 764 days between their official application and eventual approval in March, leaving them only a year to be ready for the opening race of next season.
Cadillac will have sites at Silverstone, Fishers in Indiana and Charlotte in North Carolina. The main factory will be in Indianapolis, a mammoth state-of-the-art facility set to open next year. The team will use Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. When I visited the team’s Silverstone base, the 2026 chassis was sitting in a corner of one of the nondescript units. American flags are side by side with the Union Jack at the entrances.
A TV documentary series, fronted by Keanu Reeves, is following Cadillac’s entry into the sport. The series could be picked up by Disney+, after Reeves also featured on Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, which was a success for the network. The team have also secured sponsorship from Tommy Hilfiger.
Who’s in charge?
Their team principal is Graeme Lowdon, a 60-year-old with a wealth of experience in F1, having been sporting director at Virgin Racing and then Marussia. That experience of starting a team from scratch has been useful with Cadillac.
Lowdon is a skilled orator and leads with a personal touch. He composed about 300 hand-signed letters, thanking staff for committing to the Cadillac project in advance of its official approval. Had the team not gambled on having those early staff members, Lowdon believes it would have been impossible for them to compete.
Lowdon says he hopes the experience of Pérez and Bottas will help the team to take on established rivals
AP
Dan Towriss, the chief executive of TWG Motorsports, will perform the same role at Cadillac. He quickly shut down rumours of a move for Christian Horner, the former Red Bull team principal, this week. TWG Global is an American company co-chaired by Mark Walter and Thomas Tull that invests in and operates businesses across various sectors. Walter owns 12.7 per cent of BlueCo, the holding company that controls Chelsea. TWG has a motor sport arm that will include Cadillac F1, as well as the Andretti Global IndyCar team and other smaller brands.
Who are the drivers?
Cadillac have purposely opted for an experienced driver pairing: two 35-year-olds with 16 race wins and 527 starts between them in grands prix.
Pérez was most recently Max Verstappen’s Red Bull team-mate but was axed at the end of the 2024 season. The Mexican driver, who has won six grands prix and has stood on the podium 39 times, was a key part of Verstappen’s World Championship success in 2021. However, his form dipped sharply towards the end of his time at Red Bull and he was sacked with two years left on his contract.
Cadillac bosses spent time speaking to senior figures at Red Bull and concluded that Pérez’s struggles there were more about the difficulties posed by driving a car geared towards the demands of Verstappen — Pérez says the subsequent struggles of Liam Lawson, who lasted two races, and now Yuki Tsunoda means he does not have a point to prove upon returning to F1.
Bottas, the ten-times race winner, is the reserve driver for Mercedes and was most recently on the grid with Sauber in 2024. He was Lewis Hamilton’s team-mate at Mercedes from 2017 to 2021.
Bottas was most recently on the grid with Sauber in 2024
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What is their philosophy?
In the short term, at least, Cadillac will be the underdogs, and they are not underestimating the difficulty of joining the pinnacle of motor sport.
“Can you imagine if you’ve owned a Formula 1 team for ten years, and then another team rocks up and beats you?” Lowdon said. “You would be apoplectic. You would be so annoyed. So you have to assume that any new team coming in is going to be last.”
Lowdon even compared the undertaking to the Apollo project, which Cadillac have used to create an effective leadership model with their different bases on various time zones. “We’ve used a very, very flat management structure. It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes,” he said.
“Race teams are often described in military terms, organised in a kind of pyramid, and you have one person at the top and the typical military structure is command and control, so you issue commands. When it’s multi-site like this, that becomes a massive challenge.
“What you can’t have is an engineer here having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just a different geographic location, but a different country altogether. Instead, it’s a different structure, where it’s mission control, instead of command and control.”
They will also be a disruptor to the existing F1 outfits, taking some of their staff — which will not make them many friends — while some harbour reservations about an 11th team receiving a share of profits.
Their flashy Miami launch during that grand prix weekend featured celebrities such as the actor Terry Crews and Janelle Monáe, the Grammy-nominated singer and actress.
How are they preparing?
The team are simulating race weekends to ensure that simple teething issues, including communication between staff members, are ironed out. Their next simulation will be during the Italian Grand Prix at Monza next month.
Bottas remains under contract with Mercedes as reserve driver and will attend all the F1 races with them, whereas Pérez is free to start with Cadillac straight away. He is hoping to test a recent F1 car — which Cadillac will have to borrow from another team — before the end of the year.
Both drivers will have to re-evaluate their goals given the very real possibility that the two former race winners could be fighting at the back of the grid to avoid last place.
“It’s going to be difficult. But I’ve signed up for this, I know what to expect,” Bottas said. “Mentally if you kind of prepare for the worst, it’s better, because then whatever you achieve is going to be really rewarding.”