Cadillac F1 car passes critical FIA hurdle ahead of 2026 debut

Cadillac’s Formula 1 project quietly crossed a critical threshold in early December – one that won’t grab headlines like a race debut, but could decide how smoothly the American marque makes it to the grid in 2026.

Behind closed doors, away from lap times and liveries, Cadillac passed a set of FIA tests that effectively confirmed its first F1 chassis won’t just exist on paper.

For a team still building factories, processes and people from scratch, it was a moment of genuine consequence.

A Crucial Box Ticked Before the Clock Bites

Earlier this month, Cadillac successfully cleared mandatory FIA homologation tests covering the survival cell and the entire rear structure of its first Formula 1 car. Team principal Graeme Lowdon didn’t dress it up – this mattered.

“Passing those tests by December was something I think the design group within the Cadillac Formula 1 team can be really proud of,” commented Lowdon, quoted by The Race.

The challenge is magnified by the 2026 regulations, which reduce car weight while tightening safety demands.

“If we look at the design challenges in the new formula, with the weight of the car significantly reduced, these tests become effectively more and more stringent in comparison, because you're targeting a lower overall car mass,” he added.

“So for any team to pass them, I think it's a milestone. For us, it's more so because we haven't got years and years and years of team-based experience of designing these components.”

Failing the tests would have triggered redesigns that could have compromised cooling layouts, weight targets and – most dangerously – the overall timeline. Given Cadillac only received final approval to enter F1 at the start of this year, that kind of delay was simply not an option.

Instead, the green light allows the project to move forward toward a January shakedown and the first closed test of the new era in Spain later that month.

Delivery First, Perfection Later

Passing homologation does not mean Cadillac will arrive in Europe with a fully refined machine. Far from it. Even by the standards of a brand-new regulation set, the first version of the car will be immature.

Lowdon insists the programme is “on schedule”, but the scale of the task is enormous. The 2026 cars require roughly 85,000 individual components to be designed, produced or outsourced — and one late delivery can derail an entire test plan.

“You're constantly faced with these trade-offs,” Lowdon said.

“What we've done, which I think is sensible, is prioritised delivery over everything else, because we're still building our factories and manufacturing facilities and all sorts of other things, and they'll take years to come fully online.

“Some of the other teams know how far to push their internal production processes to the absolute limit. That wouldn't be a sensible approach for what we're doing coming in as a new team.

“You have to leave some margin, and like everything in Formula 1, as soon as you make any decision, there is a compromise, and there is a cost to it.”

Cadillac accepts those compromises — for now. The upside of the 2026 rules reset is the volume of testing available, which offers a chance to claw back lost ground.

“But equally, we've got programmes in place to catch up in those areas as well. The good thing about the ’26 season is there's an awful lot of testing opportunity.

“Those opportunities can give us a chance to bring new parts even at that stage.”

That points toward a car that will evolve rapidly, with meaningful updates likely appearing as early as the two Bahrain tests in February, provided production capacity keeps pace.

Why January Matters So Much

Raw performance isn’t Cadillac’s immediate priority. Simply running reliably — and learning — comes first. That’s why Lowdon views the January running as invaluable, not inconvenient.

“Every single bit of focus is on ’26 so having the opportunity to test is super valuable,” he said.

“It's not a mandatory test at the end of the day. So if teams decide that it's not useful, they won't go.

“We know that the challenge that we have is different. The very fact that we can actually go and test is great.”

Unlike established teams, Cadillac has virtually no on-track reference data. Its only running so far has been a brief two-day test at Imola in a borrowed 2023 Ferrari — a reminder of how unusual its situation is.

“At the minute, it was super difficult for us to do a test [with an old car]. Unbelievably difficult. It's not difficult for any other team to do it because they've got previous cars. We haven't.

“That's the kind of thing where just being able to test in January is helpful.”

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For Cadillac, every kilometre matters because nothing in its simulation environment has yet been validated against reality.

“With a project like this, every day is a school day, and you're learning something all the time. And the quicker we can get the car on the track…you have to remember that as a team, we don't have the benefit that the other teams have of having a windtunnel that's correlated to what we're seeing on the track.

“These teams here are running a ’25 car, and they'll know their correlation to their ’25 models. So when they start putting the ’26 model in that same windtunnel, they'll have a good idea about whether it's accurate. Or what kind of scenarios would cause the correlation problems, or whatever.

“We have none of that at all. There's nothing that's been in our windtunnel or CFD that's ever turned the wheel on the track yet.

“So the quicker we get that element of feedback the better.”

The milestone Cadillac reached in December won’t be visible when the lights go out in Melbourne next year. But without it, the rest of the journey might never have begun.

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