Lowdon shrugs over car choice as Cadillac targets a shakedown before year-end
Cadillac won’t waste time splitting hairs over which car it runs before the year is out. The priority, says team principal Graeme Lowdon, is simply to get the new crew working around a live machine and start building rhythm for 2026.
The American outfit, which is ramping up for its F1 debut next season, has been exploring a private outing under TPC rules — the Testing of a Previous Car provisions that allow teams to run machinery from the previous three seasons. That’s a neat option for established outfits. For Cadillac, with no “previous car” of its own, it likely means borrowing a 2022–24 chassis from a rival with FIA sign-off. Failing that, there’s the THC route — Testing of Historic Cars — for anything older.
Lowdon, though, isn’t hung up on the badge on the nose or the year on the rulebook.
“We don’t have a previous car. The car isn’t actually important,” he said on F1’s Beyond The Grid podcast. “We’re not looking to do this test to engineer something… We want the mechanics to regain that muscle memory of working with a live car. It doesn’t have to be a Formula 1 car. It’s good if it is.”
Paddock chatter suggests Cadillac is close to nailing down a plan and a chassis for a run before the end of 2025, though whether that’s TPC with another team’s car or something more left-field remains to be seen. Either way, the brief is simple: dry-run the race team, not the aerodynamics.
“If a car reaches a certain age, it’s no longer a previous car, it becomes a historic car,” Lowdon added. “I wouldn’t get too hung up on whether it’s TPC, THC, whatever, or even whether it’s an F1 car. What we want is an environment where the mechanics get used to each other, and learn everyone’s way of doing things.”
With headquarters in Charlotte and a major UK base at Silverstone, Cadillac has flexibility on venue too. “It’ll depend on the location of whichever cars we’re using because, again, the location doesn’t matter. It could be anywhere… Ideally, we’d prefer stable weather, but yeah, it doesn’t really matter. The main thing is that everyone is together, learning to work together.”
On-track mileage is only one piece of the prep. The team has already been running full-race weekend simulations in parallel with Grands Prix, mirroring the timing and cadence of sessions as if Cadillac was on the grid — complete with media commitments blocked out for the drivers and a live “mission control” operation.
“We have an ops room in Silverstone. We’ve got 60, 70 engineers running this entire race weekend exactly as it would be as if we were competing,” Lowdon explained. “Our car isn’t on the tarmac in Monza. It’s in the simulator in Charlotte.”
Internally, the programme is called “Race Ready”, and it’s already paying off in the details that matter over a long season. The first full run-through came around Barcelona, where Lowdon sat on a virtual pit wall and discovered how varied the team’s collective radio habits were — a byproduct of hiring from across the pit lane.
“You could actually tell where some of these people had raced because they have different radio protocols,” he said. “Now we’ve done a lot of work to get everybody on the same language set and communicating in the same way.”
That ethos threads through the whole operation. Pit stop choreography. Garage build and breakdown. Remote ops links between Silverstone and the track. The goal is blunt: arrive in 2026 without a single “first time” moment that isn’t the lights going out.
“We do not want to get to Melbourne and for there to be a first time anything there for anything other than the race,” Lowdon said. “We have massive respect for the teams that we’re going to race against. They’re hugely skilled, hugely competitive. Partly, the way of showing our respect is the amount of effort we’re trying to put in to make sure that we want to compete with them.”
That’s the quiet read on Cadillac’s plan: less hype, more reps. In a year when 2026’s technical reset will make correlation from an old car tenuous at best, the value is in people, process and polish. Whether the shakedown happens in Spain, Italy or somewhere less glamorous, expect it to look more like a dress rehearsal than a data grab — and that’s precisely the point.
