Racing
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Cadillac’s first seven Formula 1 races have convinced Graeme Lowdon that the new team has made the right kind of start, but he says that progress has already created a “double-edged sword” as expectations begin to rise faster than the project itself.
Lowdon said Cadillac has established itself as a “competent and tidy outfit at the back of the grid” without the visible teething problems that often mark a new arrival. The team was still last in the Constructors’ Championship at that stage, yet its MAC-26 had already shown enough to fight with, and at times beat, Aston Martin’s Adrian Newey-supervised AMR26.
Monaco was the clearest example of both Cadillac’s promise and the danger that comes with it. Aston Martin scored its only point of the season there through Fernando Alonso’s 10th place, but Sergio Perez finished ahead of Alonso on the road before a time penalty cost Cadillac what would have been its first point.
Speaking from Cadillac’s new hospitality unit in Monaco, Lowdon said the team had pushed hard to establish momentum immediately. “We’ve really pushed to start as we mean to go on, and we’ve had pretty much something at every race,” Cadillac team boss Graeme Lowdon said.
That progress, he argued, changes the pressure around the team almost as quickly as it changes the car’s competitiveness. “If you make a step forward, it raises everyone’s expectations,” Lowdon said. “You can either see them as a massive problem, or you can embrace them, and I think it’s better to embrace them.”
He said the challenge is to avoid “territory where the expectations are just too high,” and that the only way to do that is by keeping “huge respect for all the teams that we compete against” and making sure everybody understands “just how competitive this game is.”
Lowdon also stressed that much of Cadillac’s strongest work is not visible from the outside because the team has been building its race operation while expanding its wider infrastructure. He described the Monaco hospitality unit itself as a major project that had to be delivered on time because “The 2026 Monaco Grand Prix doesn’t wait for us.” At the same time, Cadillac has been building facilities in Indianapolis, Charlotte and Silverstone.
He said the smooth impression Cadillac has made in the paddock is valuable, but it comes with a cost. Once a new entrant arrives looking established, it is judged like one. Lowdon called that another “two-edged sword,” because when a team turns up “looking the part,” rivals and observers expect it to perform at that level as well.
That leaves Cadillac managing a more complicated first season than the standings alone suggest. Its stated aim from the start was to arrive with “proper intent” and “bold ambition,” not simply to fill a place on the grid, and its polished opening seven races have made that ambition credible enough to bring immediate pressure with it.