The Indiana fishermen are set to become the headquarters of the new Cadillac Formula 1 team, but the huge facility is still under construction.
So does the Power Unit division, which General Motors and the team hopes to operate and distribute their work engines by the end of the decade. And obviously, the team’s first car is in development in preparation for the Cadillac’s 2026 debut.
Delivering that car isn’t an easy task for any of the existing 10 teams on the grid, but doing so when building an entire constructor from scratch is a completely different matter.
Apart from the logo launch event in Miami, Cadillac has been relatively quiet since confirming entry in early March. And you can choose to stay that way until everything you need is up and running and you can see the full team to the world.
Instead, Team Principal Graeme Loudon decided to open the door to a UK base to reveal the conditions currently in operation.
This was not a tour designed to impress. It’s not from an aesthetic point of view anyway. Silverstone facilities are part of the wider Silverstone Park development, with six different buildings in the industrial park being used by Cadillac in a variety of ways. These are not adjacent buildings, but require a short walk between the majority.
Ultimately, the number was reduced to four permanent buildings, with three main buildings being the UK Technical Centre, UK Production Centre and UK Logistics Centre. However, as it is necessary to juggle various projects, including conversions of Cadillac-owned space at this point, the current six leases are secured other than ultimately moving forward with a 10-year lease that plays other roles.
“I… how do I build an F1 team? I build a Works Level F1 team from scratch, but don’t know if there’s an entry?” Lodoon says of the starting point.
“Like most things, it starts with people. So I made a list of the important people that really, really needed to get on quickly… and that’s where it starts.
“Then you fork from there, because as those people get on board, you are always making sure you have this balancing act of all the assets they need.
“And if you don’t have enough buildings, there’s no 400 people. And the actual building we purchased will be building for 12 months, so we need more buildings. So you end up with this juggling act, but it all starts with people.
“Every high-performance team, everything starts, ends, middle bits. Everything is about getting a good person.”
But there was also the need to build an entire infrastructure on top of people. Lowdon estimates that if work begins the moment an entry is granted, it will take two and a half years to bring the entire team together. And that’s before you actually start building your car.
That lead time is so long that the approval of the entry timed out, and Cadillac had to take a risk by starting work before checking the location on the grid.
Over the 116 days after that confirmation, approximately 400 people have been employed, and 10,000 components have already been created, including the first 2026 chassis that crashed, and 6,000 purchase orders have been issued.
The week before the visit, 30 new suppliers were onboard, and five petabytes of CFD data were generated and stored, but previously nonexistent.
Doing all that, along with modifying the building to suit your purpose, understands what Lodoon calls the “music chair.” The future UK distribution centre currently serves multiple purposes, with the model shop and the aforementioned ’26 chassis also housed on the rig. Both moved a few days ago.
Work in these departments will also be done on temporary hardware prior to future relocation, bringing space back into logistics. It’s a far cry from the refined homes of many existing teams.
Even the design offices are decorated only with televisions that show important dates and milestones that need to be hit, thanks to their early locations in the car production timeline, even one of the team’s most mature divisions.
Along with some large photos of important past moments in various TWG motorsport properties, such as Alexander Rossi’s Indy 500 victory, the archive Mario Andretti images are the only bit of window dressing seen in one of the small satellite buildings. This is a lot more team than making temporary setups look neat.
However, selling people on projects has proven to be a fruitful job. Also, being a part of something from the start offers rare opportunities. There is no inheritance and no carryover. Cadillac can provide more responsibility to personnel to set up future courses.
Now it’s one task to put it together, but doing so in multiple locations in Indiana, North Carolina and Michigan adds more complexity. And to do the job, Cadillac is reefing books from another American facility.
“When you look at the tasks at hand, there is a constant deadline,” explains Lodoon. “There is a huge need for peer-to-peer interactions, which is why we need engineers to talk to engineers.
“Here we have to talk to an engineer from Charlotte and another engineer from Warren, Michigan, or ultimately a fisherman, so we have come to have a very flat management structure.
“It’s a very modelling of the Apollo project. It’s very similar. Well, we don’t have guys on the moon, but sometimes it feels like that. That’s why we’re leaning heavily towards the management structure used in the Apollo project.
“It’s so funny… I don’t know if other teams have used it before.
“This is a very flat management structure. So race teams are often described in military terminology. Even if you watch a garage tour, someone will say, “This is organized in a kind of pyramid and there’s one person.” And the typical military structure is command and control.
“If it’s a multi-site like this, it’s a big challenge. And what you can’t have is that you have to go up and down a particular tier here and, for example, go up and down a completely different country, not just another geographical location.
“Instead, it’s a kind of different structure that’s mission control instead of command and control. So you have this really flat structure. Engineers can talk directly to each other, and what’s so conveyed to them is the mission itself.
“Everyone knows what the mission is. They know what they need to do. They don’t need to be told, “If you go, you’ll make a 6-bit.”
“It’s a massive simplification of that hierarchy. It’s a very flat structure. We divide our business into 12 different offices. They all communicate with each other. And they are all completely geographically agnostic.
“So far, it works. The pudding evidence depends on whether the car is fast or not.”
Learning from NASA not only goes beyond the actual management structure, but also extends to the attitudes within the team. Lowdon is extremely experienced within Motorsport and Formula 1, but he doesn’t believe that plans to eventually run much of the Cadillac from the US are likely to be harmful in the face of 10 teams based almost exclusively in the UK and Italy.
“There’s this perception that Formula 1 only takes place in the UK or Europe. And I’m continuing to think. There’s a lot of really good engineering in the US. They literally put people on the moon.
“And we have already done at GM and we have discovered that the standards for caliber and engineering are very high, which is why my colleagues at GM Technical Center in Charlotte are already working on various subsystems of the car.
In the ongoing work at Silverstone, many of the data and images from various computer screens are well known as they continue to develop the 2026 Challenger. But the same cannot be said about the surroundings that do so.
Accommodating functional F1 teams aiming to grow to at least 600 by the time the race takes place within 250 days is an attractive job to develop those very buildings themselves.
“Does that amount to putting a man on the moon?” asked Lodon. Perhaps not, but Cadillac has certainly been filming stars for a while.
