Why Cadillac's already impressing F1 rivals

Acutely aware of the huge task it faces, Cadillac’s new Formula 1 team has gone about its business quietly in preparing for its debut – but that is about to end.

“The next time we roll out, it’s with two cars in front of a few hundred million people,” says team principal Graeme Lowdon with a smile.

“So, no pressure.”

There’s no such thing as ‘quiet’ when you are part of the F1 circus proper, and what happens in Australia and beyond will lay bare the quality of the job Cadillac has done, how much it needs to improve, and eventually how good it is at doing that.

The scrutiny will be intense and there will be no hiding. Fortunately, this is a team with leadership that knows that. And while it intends to do its talking on the track, it also knows what is likely in the short-term, so there’s been no pretence that Cadillac will immediately come in and blow others away, upset the establishment, or any such noise.

All expectations are that Cadillac will be at the back, but it looks set to start life as a respectable backmarker and maybe even start the season out-doing a much bigger, much more established team with great F1 names attached to it.

Expectations are extremely realistic: with the only real competitive goal worth setting being inside the 107% cut-off in qualifying, and being reliable enough to finish races. In other words, fast enough to be there, competent enough to finish. On the basis of the best Bahrain test times, Cadillac has around three seconds of margin before it's at risk from the 107% rule.

“The 107% rule was put there as pretty much a benchmark of you’ve really got to try and be inside that,” Lowdon says.

“So far we’re comfortably there – and actually pushing a couple of teams who’ve been doing this for quite some time.”

Those teams, on the face of testing, are crisis-ridden Aston Martin and winter disappointment Williams. Both scored podium finishes in the last rules cycle but are starting this one on the back foot in different forms of disarray.

The only chance Cadillac had of beating anybody this season was if it could be at the very top end of its own potential and if others badly underachieved. What is so encouraging for Cadillac is that, at the very start of the season at least, there is a chance of exactly that being the case.

Upset on the cards?

Testing’s just testing and the picture can change quickly but if the season opener took place immediately after pre-season testing ended in Bahrain, Cadillac would have a great chance of beating Aston Martin.

Adrian Newey’s Honda-powered superteam has had an awful start to 2026 with an engine that’s too unreliable, lacking performance, and limiting what can be understood about the car itself. The Aston Martin-Honda package was about as far off the pace as Cadillac in Bahrain over a single lap and couldn’t run for long enough to provide a real reference for its race stint prospects.

Aston Martin should have greater immediate performance potential – this is certainly what Lowdon expects – but needs a significant improvement in reliability to realistically make the finish with both cars in Australia. And even if it can make it to the end, what kind of form will that be in? Could its performance just be the same as Bahrain testing, or even worse, if the engine’s having to run conservatively to complete a race distance?

Cadillac won’t be drawn into public declarations about beating Aston Martin, but whether by retirement or on actual pace, it is a genuine target. That prospect might be blown out of the water by Friday in Melbourne but it’s a great source of motivation for that team to have someone to aim for.

Lowdon says it would change “everything” to have a competitor on-track – especially if it ends up in a direct development race against someone and can benchmark itself properly.

“It's huge,” he says. “We don't know where we're going to be just yet. But if we can be racing [others], then it's game on.

“Because we know we have to develop and Formula 1 is such a development race. In that respect, we don't have any real excuses. Once you're developing, you're in the same boat as everybody else.

“We've got much more immature tool sets to do that. But there's a big, big difference between developing against the stopwatch and developing if you're racing people.

“It just changes everything. It changes the motivation and the expectation. It just changes everything. If we can be racing people, then it's what we want and what we're here for.”

What’s happening elsewhere also shows just how easy it is to get a brand new set of rules badly wrong, which is critical context for understanding what could have tripped Cadillac up, and how well it has done to avoid any major red flags heading to Melbourne.

“It does contextualise it - and it just shows how difficult it is,” says Lowdon.

“That team [Aston Martin] has unbelievably clever and experienced people at it and a huge amount of resource. We have a huge respect for that team and everybody in it. I'm absolutely convinced that they'll move forward on the grid very, very rapidly. There's no doubt in my mind.

“It reminds us of just how bloody difficult this game is. It's so hard. It's so difficult. Because when you see it on the TV, you just see some shiny cars on the grid. There's lots of series that have that around the world. There's lots of formula around the world that have that.

“Once you then lift the lid on just what it takes to produce that, it's just so difficult.”

As a Ferrari customer Cadillac hasn’t got its own engine to design yet, so hasn’t had to worry about that side of things. But you can also look at Mercedes customer Williams, which botched its car build, for a clear example of what a team can misjudge and the problems it can cause itself even when the engine’s being taken care of.

And actually Williams was so underwhelming in Bahrain testing that it didn’t look like Cadillac was miles adrift of that team at the very back of the midfield group.

Impressing rivals already

Imagine if Cadillac was the team that missed the first Barcelona test, or got to Bahrain and was struggling to do multi-lap runs. Imagine if Cadillac got itself into such a problematic situation that it only did six untimed laps on the final day of testing.

It would be lambasted as unfit for purpose, told that it underestimated the challenge of F1, and serve as proof that those who didn’t want to let it onto the grid were right all along.

There were testing niggles for Cadillac but nothing that leaves the team scrambling for fixes - quite the opposite, actually. Lowdon says he goes to Australia “as assured as we can be” that both cars are capable of making it to the finish there.

“We don't underestimate the challenge of reliability,” he says. “These machines are unbelievably complex now.

“The issues that we've encountered and fixed have been largely configurations and telemetry type stuff. All those kinds of things that are invisible to the eye, which can make them a little bit frustrating because you lose some track time, but it's nothing that other teams wouldn't have faced in their growth.

“It is a bit more challenging for a new team because everyone's got a brand new car, everyone's got a brand new power unit, but every single tool that we use in the garage and back at base is new.

“Every single thing in that garage is brand new, so everything's had to have a shakedown. Whilst that's obvious with mechanical things like fuel bowsers or something like that, it does get very complex when you're talking about IT racks!

“The sheer configuration of a lot of this stuff is mind-blowing, but considering that challenge, we can be happy that we're going to Melbourne still with a huge challenge but one that we'll relish.”

Even if it is last in Australia (entirely possible), fails to score a point all season (ditto) and finishes bottom of the constructors’ championship (likeliest of all) – Cadillac can still hold its head high this year as long as it doesn’t seriously wobble from this strong foundation.

The demands of starting a brand new F1 team from scratch are massive, especially when a drawn-out application process meant Cadillac had to be ready to go from ‘entry approved’ to ‘F1 race debut’ in just over 12 months.

It has had to navigate setting up a new factory, new tools, new garage equipment, new systems, new processes – and Lowdon says he’s been receiving messages from rival teams throughout pre-season who are very aware of the job Cadillac’s done. These aren’t polite platitudes or patronising messages of ‘aw, haven’t you done well’ - it’s genuine recognition from people who were in the middle of sorting their own cars and problems out, treating Cadillac as an equal.

And though Lowdon’s loath to commit to specific expectations or targets he does admit this all constitutes Cadillac achieving an intangible early aim.

“If we can come away from the pre-season with a solid foundation, a team that's really ready to push, with the objective of racing people as soon as we can…that's got to be seen as a huge achievement, whichever way you look at it,” he says.

“Because we respect these teams. Our first objective was actually to gain their respect and the way to do that is to start pushing them.

“We had a lot of really very nice comments and messages from people in a lot of the teams just when we turned up in Barcelona. In fact, it happened when we did our shakedown in Silverstone and I got messages from some people at other teams who were focused on getting their shakedown done.

“And the message was very much, ‘well done, I know how difficult it is because we're sorting ours out!’. That kind of respect, that was our first objective.”

Proving it can be competitive

That matters considering Cadillac had very few friends in the paddock when trying to get an entry, and had a big job to do to be taken seriously. Remember what F1 said about an earlier version of this project when its entry was initially rejected?

“We do not believe that the applicant would be a competitive participant” – that was part of the justification for dismissing what was still more overtly a Michael Andretti-led project but had many of the same key individuals involved, and ultimately similar intentions.

There’s no doubt what the entry eventually morphed into to get approval is different enough, and more credible. General Motors co-owns the team alongside TWG Global – which also owns Andretti, but that name has been shuffled out of the picture.

An initial planned Renault engine deal wouldn’t have been possible even if that entry was granted first time around because Renault’s withdrawn as an engine manufacturer, and replacing it with a Ferrari supply is undeniably a better foundation.

So it would be unfair to hang F1 by its own words where this team is concerned because it’s not quite the same and it is in a better place for being forced into its eventual composition. But it is still an interesting point of reference. At times, this project has had to battle the clear implication it wouldn’t be a ‘proper’ or a ‘credible’ team - often hidden beneath that notion of not being ‘competitive’.

Lowdon’s attitude to that is simple: “We can talk about our team as much as we want but if we don't deliver in terms of mileage and performance and everything else, then all we're doing is talking.”

The focus on doing the basics right has been key to getting Cadillac ready for its debut. It’s been pragmatic with its initial targets on the car side by not pushing production deadlines too hard or being over-ambitious with the starting point of the aerodynamic design itself. But it has still decided to build its own gearbox casings and rear suspension rather than take the whole hog from Ferrari, which is a big design and manufacturing undertaking and actually gives Cadillac a bigger workload than some customer teams such as Haas or Williams.

And again, what that has led to is starting the season seemingly neck and neck with a team that is backed to the hilt with hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, a brand new factory, a new works engine deal, and Adrian Newey running the show.

Of course, if Cadillac goes through the year drifting further away, getting lapped two or three times every race, that’s not OK. But Cadillac at least looks likely to start 2026 able to give the best possible account of itself, be a very respectable debutant – and maybe claim an unlikely scalp in the process.

“If anything it's helped frame just how difficult the task is,” Lowdon says, with one final polite sidestepping of the prospect of beating Aston Martin.

“And the thing is, we can't sit back and say this has been a nice pre-season or whatever – because it means nothing if we don't build on it.”