On May 25, 1961, NASA was given a task by the incumbent President Kennedy – land a man on the Moon before the decade was out.

It was a task never before completed by the human race, one that had seemed unthinkable even a few decades ago and one that required over 400,000 men and women to write their own playbook. As well as the small matter of $25.4 billion.

It is little wonder, then, that the Apollo missions have been a source of inspiration for Cadillac team principal Graeme Lowdon.

While building a race car is hardly a comparison to setting foot on another celestial body, the challenge can feel just as intimidating for those on the inside and as those who worked on the Apollo missions experienced, the questions just keep adding up.

But when Lowdon was approached by General Motors and TWG in 2024, there was one question the American motoring giant wanted to know – how do you actually start a Formula 1 team?

“I was hired as a consultant for the project,” Lowdon recalled to select media, including PlanetF1.com, from Cadillac’s Silverstone base. “I gave two initial pieces of advice.

“One was how the entry process works because it’s not clear. Formula 1’s kind of an interesting sport, because you can download all the rules off the internet, but you can’t download the one that says how do you actually enter.

“So the first part was explaining how the entry process works and the call for expressions of interest and all that kind of thing. And then the second bit of advice was, for this to work, you just have to start building the team.

“Very easy piece of advice to give and then they said ‘Okay, well, can you help us build the team?’ And so I was then presented with exactly the question that you’ve just asked, which is, well, how do you build a Formula 1 team?”

Lowdon was appointed team principal in December 2024, a promotion from his role as consultant and one that came with the requirement of no longer just giving advice but putting things into practice.

He said: “It starts with the people. I made a list of the key people that were needed to get on board really quickly and then it kind of starts from there.

“It branches out from there as well because as those people get on board, you’re constantly making sure you’ve got this balancing act of all the assets that they need. There’s no point having 400 people if we’ve got no IT department that’s geared up to care for them.

“And there’s no point having 400 people if you haven’t got enough buildings, and we need more buildings, because the actual buildings that we bought are going to be building sites for 12 months. So you end up in this, in this juggling act.”

That juggling act has brought Lowdon and his team to Silverstone, situated across the road from the famous circuit.

This part of the UK has become the unofficial home of Formula 1. Aston Martin are a few hundred yards away, Red Bull and Mercedes a bit further. A short drive will take you to Alpine, Haas and Williams. Head south and you will eventually arrive at McLaren.

Every team but Ferrari and Sauber have some presence in the UK, meaning that despite Cadillac’s desire to be America’s team, having a base this side of the pond was a practical necessity.

It was the UK operations that Cadillac had opened the doors to the media to but even arriving at the facility showed this was a team unlike others already on the grid.

In recent years, F1 factories have become monuments to the team. Driving past McLaren’s Technology Centre, Red Bull’s Milton Keynes campus and Mercedes’ Brackley home, it is obvious for even non-F1 fans who is inside. Aston Martin, based just down the road from Cadillac, is an enormous HQ with that distinctive winged logo everywhere.

And yet when 400,000 fans arrive for Silverstone this weekend, few would know that F1’s 11th team is close by.

You do not have to be in this unassuming industrial park for long to realise that it is substance first, style second, such is the necessity of the task.

The team were given the final approval to join F1 on March 07, 2025, just a year and a day from their first race. Every office and factory floor has a reminder of just how many days were left before FP1 in Melbourne.

Cadillac have six buildings, aiming to condense it down to four, and they are intermingled with other businesses. Lowdon described it as “musical chairs” as departments are moved from one area to another and it is not as if the team were idly sitting by waiting for the final green light.

“We actually had our first 2026 floor delivered in January. So that’s before we even got the entry. There is no other way of doing the process as it currently stands.

“The entry process took 764 days. In previous years, it took 17 weeks. This one was significantly longer.

“And you can’t wait to actually get the approval. You have to take a risk if you’re going to race, because the entry process is specifically for entry in a certain number of a certain championship years.

“So if you just wait until you get the entry and then start doing everything that we’ve been doing, you would time out. It becomes an impossible task.

“We’ve already issued somewhere in the region of 6000 drawings. We’ve made 10,000 components already.

“We have to build the building, we have to put the machines in, we have to hire the people. We have to train the people. So we rely heavily on third-party suppliers. And to give you an idea, this week, we onboarded 30 new suppliers, and that’s the kind of cadence that’s needed.

“It’s a huge task in just supplier management, and then we’re looking over time to internalise a lot of that manufacturing.

“On the IT side we’ve issued 425 laptops, that might sound really insignificant, but an established team will just do refreshes and stuff. When you’re doing that kind of volume in one hit. It’s very impressive to see some of this happen.

“They’ve issued 6000 purchase orders just from the IT department, and they’re currently storing five petabytes of CFD data.”

As to where Apollo comes in, the answer to that is how a team with bases in the US and the UK operates.

“If we had more time, I could bore you silly about the management structure that we’ve come up with,” he said. “If you look at the task in hand, we’ve got immovable deadlines.

“We’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction. So we need engineers talking to engineers. So we need an engineer here talking to an engineer in Charlotte, another one in Warren, Michigan or eventually in Fishers.

“And so we have a very flat management structure and it’s highly modelled on the Apollo Project. It’s very similar. Okay, we’re not putting a man on the Moon, but it feels like it sometimes.

“So we’ve leaned heavily on the management structures that were used for the Apollo Project. Super interesting, I could bore somebody silly with it at some stage. I don’t know if other teams have used that before.”

While starting from scratch undoubtedly puts you at a disadvantage, it also has its perks.

Cadillac’s 10 rivals have to focus on this season while the American team can put all their efforts on 2026. Inside the factory, monitors showed a live feed of Toyota’s wind tunnel in Cologne that Cadillac are using. Models of front and rear wings sit on top of workbenches having just come back from Germany. In the corner, a full 2026 chassis is already built and tested.

There is little doubt, then, that Cadillac will be ready come the first race – but what then? A monster the size of GM does not get into a series just to take part but when you are stepping into the unknown, even a seasoned operator like Lowdon cannot give a clear answer.

“In terms of competitiveness, we get down to that same old thorny issue. It would be great if nobody else was competing, because then you’d know exactly where you were.

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“Genuinely, we have no idea where the competition are going to be at. We can only just focus on the things that we can control. And I know it might sound like an obvious answer, but it is.

“Talking with our shareholders, for sure we have discussions about what expectations should be and the easiest way I can describe it to them is, can you imagine, if you’ve owned a Formula 1 team for 10 years and then another team rocks up and beats you, you would be apoplectic, you would be so annoyed.

“So you have to assume that any new team coming in is is going to be last. Otherwise, what’s gone wrong somewhere else?

“And to a large extent, that’s the only way you can kind of set the frame, if you like. We’re trying to be as competitive as we possibly can. We’re realistic. We know how difficult it is. You’ve seen the timelines. They’re super, super, super short.

“We have no idea at the moment, like none whatsoever. We see the numbers. We’re happy with our progress, but we just don’t know.”

Despite his hesitation, it is hard to see how, with the weight of GM behind them, Lowdon and his team do not become a competitive force at some point in the future, meaning these six buildings on an industrial park may not be so unrecognisable for long…

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