Symonds: Scale of building Cadillac F1 entry from scratch "frightening"

Cadillac's executive engineering consultant Pat Symonds has called the scale of setting up a Formula 1 team from scratch "frightening", as the American brand prepares for its first season in 2026.

Symonds joined the team at the start of this year after serving a lengthy gardening leave period following his departure from FOM, where he served as chief technical officer. Working for the championship, he was an influential figure in the development of the 2022 regulations.

Cadillac's entry bid was originally lodged by Andretti Global and cleared the FIA's entry hurdles, but was not originally cleared by FOM. When General Motors took over the application, underpinned by TWG's takeover of the Andretti Global portfolio, the brand's commitment to developing an engine helped grease its path towards securing an entry for 2026.

Symonds spoke of the task ahead of the team, and noted that the commitment from those who had stuck with Cadillac despite the uncertainty of a 2026 had been a significant boon.

"Yeah, [the scale is] pretty frightening. I think what is absolutely amazing is the commitment that everyone at Cadillac has had to this new team," said Symonds.

"We didn't actually get our official entry until 7 March of this year. And that's 364 days before FP1 in Australia. Now you cannot put a team together in 364 days. So there was this incredible commitment prior to that to get people on board.

"One of the things I thought was going to be most challenging was recruitment, and indeed it has been. At the beginning of the year we had 159 people in the UK working on the project with support from all the various people.

Cadillac Formula 1 Team Simulating a race weekend in preparation for 2026

Photo by: Cadillac Communications

"By the time we got the entry we were up to about 209, and now we're at 426. So that growth has been really rapid, but that's been very difficult.

"When I arrived, I think the first thing that struck me - of course there are an awful lot of people I knew, a lot of people I've worked with in the past - was the real quality of the work that had been done there. There are an awful lot of things that I think are real front-of-the-grid quality."

Symonds pointed towards the difficulty involved in laying out the infrastructure needed to set up a team, particularly given that this is a challenge that few have been accustomed to in recent years.

Regardless, he was pleased with the response from those at Cadillac to meet that challenge - and revealed that the team had already got a prototype chassis built to help it prepare for the FIA's homologation and crash test processes.

"It's a challenge. There's an awful lot to do. and I'm not going to say that building a Formula 1 car is easy. It's not easy. But I've done around 40 of them now, so you sort of get to know what has to be done and when it has to be done by.

"But the rest of it, building all the infrastructure around it, all the processes, all the procedures, all the logistics, all the buildings, you just don't do it very often.

"And it's a task that is not only incredibly difficult, but you just don't have that experience if you haven't done it so many times before. So that's been a huge challenge that people have risen to so well."

Simon Pagenaud, Cadillac F1 Team

Photo by: Antoan Phu / Cadillac F1 Team

He added: "We're doing well. We've built one chassis, a prototype chassis. It wasn't a race-intent chassis because it was actually designed before we knew all the details of the engine installation and things like that.

"But what it allowed us to do was to prove out the processes we needed to go through because a lot of people talk about new engine, new aerodynamics and everything, but there's an awful lot of new safety regulations as well.

"There's some very, very difficult tests to pass on the chassis. So we built a chassis, went through all those tests in second quarter of the year. We've now got our first sort of race-intent chassis; we've booked it for its homologation test, for its crash test and things in a couple of weeks. I think we've got a lot of parts appearing in the stores and we're getting on with it."