As May’s Spanish Grand Prix gets underway, a team of around 60 engineers is manning the battle stations in mission control, keenly observing how its car is performing.
Except the car isn’t on the Formula 1 grid in Barcelona. It’s in a simulator in Charlotte, while the squad is divided into two ops rooms in North Carolina and Silverstone in the UK. This isn’t your usual race support team. But Cadillac’s race simulations are proving crucial to turning F1’s ‘ghost team’ into a fully-fledged competitor in 2026.
The reasoning behind Cadillac’s intensive race simulations is simple. As it enters F1 under a new regulations cycle and doesn’t have a car to run or even test, the Graeme Lowdon led squad is trying to prepare in every other area it can to hit the ground running as it turns up for its Melbourne debut in March. Facing the might of the established 10 teams, Cadillac is facing a huge challenge as it is, so every little bit helps.
“If you’re setting up a new team, you don’t want the team to be going through the process of executing a race for the first time when it’s the real thing,” Lowdon told Autosport at the Singapore Grand Prix. “There will be a lot of extra pressure in Melbourne, because it’s the real thing, so we just try to prepare as best we can in so many areas.
“There’s a lot of experience in the team. At management level within the team, we counted up 2500 years of Formula 1 experience. But it’s the first time they have worked together in the Cadillac team.”
That degree of realism includes strictly adhering to a typical race weekend timetable, which means making its simulator drivers unavailable to the engineering team during certain timeslots for simulated media duties and other trackside commitments. But some weekends can also be used to hone in on certain problem areas. In time the team is also hoping to secure an older F1 car to start conducting pitstop practice and other garage prep.
As one of its key early appointments Cadillac recruited former Haas man Peter Crolla as race team manager
Photo by: Cadillac Communications
“It involves everything in terms of preparation for a race weekend,” added Lowdon. “Some of the simulations we do might not necessarily be an entire race weekend. It could be just certain processes and procedures, some of which will involve the car. Some of it is setting up the entire garage infrastructure and testing all of the systems. It’s different jigsaw pieces and parallel streams of workflow, and then hopefully it will all come together in Melbourne and we’ll have a smoother weekend.”
Since the first run in May, Cadillac has been conducting race simulations at nearly every grand prix. And with the squad based across different outposts on both sides of the Atlantic – Silverstone, Charlotte and an under construction US headquarters in Fishers, Indiana – Lowdon has been keen to move people around so they get used to the team’s remote workflows and communication tools. Lowdon took inspiration from NASA’s Apollo missions to make teams work together seamlessly in a flat structure, with engineers communicating peer-to-peer rather than having to go up the hierarchy.
“It’s always tens of people in each location communicating and operating as one team, but we’re trying to break up this mould of people being in one particular place,” Lowdon explained. “Some of the people who were in the UK ops room for Monza will be in Charlotte ops room for the next one, and vice versa.”
Lowdon is adamant the team has already made great strides in how it operates and communicates. “There were some really obvious improvements in systems and processes between between Barcelona and Monza. So in itself, that shows that you know what we’re doing is adding value,” he said.
“Like every other important kind of process that we’re involved with, we set up faults lists for everything and then we work through all of those in a structured fashion. We’re just learning stuff all of the time.”
Cadillac is not the first team to use a multi-location approach – Racing Bulls also has identical ops rooms in Faenza and Milton Keynes – but its international character has been baked into the operation from the start, recruiting at such a rapid rate that its now 400-strong headcount is facing a big challenges to gel as a team in time for the new season.
Recruiting a complementary driver roster
Valtteri Bottas, Sergio Perez, Cadillac
Photo by: Cadillac Communications
The ace in Cadillac’s deck of cards is being able to rely on the might of General Motors to get the start-up team up to speed. The team has access to GM’s state-of-the-art simulators in Charlotte, which the manufacturer already uses for its other racing programmes, and those simulators have now received a bespoke F1 model.
“That facility at GM is really impressive,” Lowdon said. “They’ve got five driver-in-the-loop simulators there. It was great to kickstart the Formula 1 programme with already having an established platform. We don’t have the ability to close that loop like the other teams and calibrate our simulator against a car on track, which is a shame, but that’s just the way it is. It’s just mathematics at the end of the day. But that will happen in time.”
Its simulator driver roster includes IndyCar and Indy 500 winner Simon Pagenaud, Corvette factory driver Charlie Eastwood and two-time Haas F1 starter Pietro Fittipaldi, who has an FIA superlicence and is understood to be a strong option to be the team’s reserve driver.
“Simon’s done a great job with the sim and then there was already that relationship with him [and GM]. Charlie Eastwood has been racing in the Corvette programme, so he’s in the family. And then Pietro could obviously bring in some Formula 1 experience from Haas,” said Lowdon.
“We’ve put a lot of thought into putting this group of people together, and I’m really pleased. Not just with their complimentary skills, but with the way they’re working together as well. There’s not one single person in that group who has any incentive to just fight for their own corner. They’ve all got their own programmes.”
The next step is adding Cadillac’s 2026 regulars Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas into the mix. Perez has already completed his first simulator sessions, while Cadillac is still in conversation with Mercedes on when it could gain access to the Finn.
Simon Pagenaud, Cadillac F1 Team
Photo by: Antoan Phu / Cadillac F1 Team
“We learned a lot in that first session with Checo alone,” Lowdon said. “Valtteri hasn’t been on the simulator yet, but Mercedes and Toto Wolff have been really flexible and great to deal with. In time we will get there, but at the moment we’ve got other things to focus on, and so does he.”
That focus is on the internal deadlines that Cadillac has set itself, with countdown clocks at each of its offices ticking down to the first fire-up in December and the first race in March. There is no question Cadillac will be up against it in 2026, but Lowdon is adamant the team is on track and on schedule.
Those countdown clocks are also looming large on the home screen of Lowdon’s smartphone, it appears. “According to my phone we’ve got 66 days to fire up,” Lowdon laughed after glancing at his device. “We’re on schedule at the minute. That doesn’t happen by accident. We just got a lot of really good people working very, very hard on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve got every confidence that we’ll be there, but Melbourne is just the start of the journey.”
If everything is on schedule and under control, is there any fleeting thought that perhaps Cadillac’s launch targets have not been ambitious enough?
“Yeah, it’s that old Mario Andretti quote, isn’t it? If you’re going around Indianapolis and it feels comfortable, you’re not going fast enough,” Lowdon nodded. “I get that. And trust me, this is not a stress free activity that we’re involved in.
“But Formula 1 is the ultimate team game. We get the best people that we can possibly get, put them in a team, give them the energy, the direction and the facilities to do what they do, and trust people to be able to do it as well. And then the results will follow.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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