Turning a worm into a butterfly: Cadillac's debut year to date

The August break provides a window for teams and drivers to enjoy a breather, switch off from Formula 1 for a little bit and recharge the batteries ahead of what is currently set to be 12 races in 15 weeks.

And they have to do that even if they don’t want to, because factories and suppliers are forced to stop working for a two-week period by regulation.

That might seem like the perfect chance for the newest addition to the grid to take stock and reflect on a whirlwind journey, but Cadillac has bigger ambitions than patting itself on the back for being an F1 team.

After receiving confirmation of its entry around 10 months before the 2026 cars were first due to run, Cadillac had done a good job of ensuring a reasonable understanding of the task it faced, both building a team and a car for the first time. But then the racing started.

“(The expectations) disappeared when the lights went out in Melbourne,” TWG Motorsports CEO Dan Towriss tells RACER. “It was literally that bad. And I think, honestly, that's the thing that surprised me the most. I thought I might feel some grace period while we're kind of refining some things and building out the team, and there was really none of that.

“But we're at this interesting inflection point, especially as we reflect on the mid-year, the transition that goes from building this entry super fast and getting a car on grid and being respectable, to transitioning to, what are we building for the future? Of being this team that has the reliability. That's bulletproof. Where the car is solid week in and week out.

“It's policies. Procedures. Everything is robust. There's backup procedures for the backup procedures - all the things that you need to compete in this chaotic, long Formula 1 season. And so that's a transition process as well. And so as we look at that, I think that's this crucial next step.

“This needs to happen fast, and it needs to happen well to really put us on the path. It was great to get to this point, but it's really going to be that next phase of growth, this evolutionary step of, does the the worm turn into a butterfly?”

It might seem harsh to describe any Formula 1 team as a worm, but if there is one at the moment, it’s Cadillac. Not because of the pace of the car – that has actually been respectable, both for the period where it was actually ahead of Aston Martin, and also for keeping up with the wider development rate – but because so much still remains undeveloped.

A lot of the hard work was happening behind the scenes this time last year, and that meant plenty of hurdles that were not seen publicly but still had an impact on where the team currently finds itself.

Towriss has clear ideas about where Cadillac has fallen short in its first races. But he also sees the team's path forward. Kym Illman/Getty Images

“There can be reliability issues, things that were outsourced didn't show up on time, and so it puts the pressure on everybody else," Towriss says. "There can be a hire or two that doesn't work out the way you expect. The culture is changing every month because you're bringing in new people and constantly revising that forward.

“And all of that's happening, again, while you're trying to design the car and make it competitive. So I think it's just the sheer complexity and the scale of all these multiple work streams happening simultaneously, and then this outside expectation that they should happen flawlessly. It's almost impossible for that to be the case.

A lot of problems were anticipated, and some weren't. And some of the ideas we had around how the factory should be organized or how the team should be organized aren't quite right for what we need, and what we're building, and where we're going. So I think there'll be some changes along the way as we continue to refine that and say, this is really what Cadillac Formula 1 looks like, and this is the trajectory that we have now for the future.”

RACER understands some of those changes could involve the relocation of certain commercial personnel currently based at Silverstone to Indianapolis, to further deepen the team’s American roots. Such an upheaval can be destabilizing, but would tie in with the identity that was promised at the team’s inception.

Yet talk of change should not be taken as an indication that the Cadillac entry has been a failure so far, and Towriss is happy to highlight the progress that has been made since earning its place on the grid.

"[Offered this start] I think I would have been pleased with where we're at," he says. "And looking at the results for the season, there isn't disappointment in the specific results. It's more of, I think there have been some missed opportunities. But hindsight is always 20-20.

“And again, that's why we're here, is because there's an unrelenting desire to compete, to be competitive, to build, to evolve and to grow. And so if we're satisfied and if we're complacent in any way, we don't belong here. But I can assure you we're not. We're unsatisfied but undeterred, and moving forward.”

That Cadillac has often been the slowest team this year is not a surprise, but there have been glimpses of potential, most notably when Sergio Perez missed out on an historic first point for Cadillac in Monaco due to a post-race penalty. Yet that was followed two races later by catastrophic brake duct issues that made it impossible to run for more than a handful of laps in Austria, highlighting the ups and downs that can be faced as a new team learns in a very public arena.

Whether notable change is to come or evolution continues to happen behind the scenes, Cadillac is certainly set to benefit from a few crucial things that it simply couldn’t buy a year ago: time, and experience.

“I think there's just a lot more confidence,” Towriss says of the 2027 car build. “And also the tool set is much different. So what we have to build the ’27 car are tools we didn't have, data we didn't have in ’26 to build that car.

“So I think there's certainly a glint of excitement about what we've learned with the new regulation set, the new chassis, new power units, as well as just Formula 1 itself to be ready to make a big step forward in ’27.”