(Motorsport-Total.com) – Last weekend, Cadillac competed in its first Formula 1 race as an independent team. The road there was long and rocky – and one that began five years ago. The idea leads back to Michael Andretti, who wanted to launch his own team in Formula 1.
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At that time, the plan still involved a takeover of the Sauber racing team, which fell through at the end of 2021. Dan Towriss, CEO of Cadillac owner TWG Motorsports, recalls in the podcast Beyond the Grid how he was brought on board by Andretti at the time and how it eventually led to today’s Cadillac racing team.
Andretti simply approached him at the time and asked Towriss if he would like to join his Formula 1 project as an investor. His answer: “Yes, we’ll take a look at it. We’ll join the deal with ten percent or 20 percent.”
“So we started looking into it. That was really the first time that my group, my partners, and I dealt with Formula 1,” admits Towriss, who basically hadn’t had much to do with motorsport for a long time, but came to the sport through a sponsorship in the IndyCar series and also in connection with Andretti.
Towriss’s condition for Andretti
But hurdles quickly appeared: “While this process was ongoing, it turned out that many of the other investors in this deal were not real,” he reveals. “So I had this conversation with Michael. I said: ‘Hey, this investor syndicate… yeah, they’re not real. That’s the bad news. The good news is: We’re taking over the whole thing.'”
However, Towriss set one condition for this: “I said: ‘Anyone I don’t know, I’m throwing out of the deal. This is not the time to make friends. We have to get this thing closed.'”
“That was basically the starting point for our project.”
But the deal with Sauber fell through at the last second, so Andretti and Towriss had to look for other options. “The next step was the question: Are there any other teams for sale?” he says.
Rumors about Haas in particular were circulating at the time. They also checked whether Williams might be interested in a partnership. “But there was just nothing. There were no opportunities,” says Towriss, admitting: “In hindsight, that wouldn’t have been the right thing for us anyway, given what we wanted to achieve.”
The only remaining option was to found a completely new team, which caused a lot of resistance from Formula 1 circles, which Towriss can understand, however.
And yet: “Never, not once did we really think that it wouldn’t work or that we should give up,” he says. “Every time we hit an obstacle, we just got better over time.”
What if it hadn’t worked out?
The team made an enormous upfront investment to convince the FIA, Formula 1, and potential partners of its project. “It’s a very complicated sport. You have to offer the sport added value by bringing a credible car to the track,” says Towriss.
“And that’s not a simple presentation. You can’t just create a PowerPoint document, show it to someone and say: ‘Here are all the boxes, this is how they’re connected,’ and then expect someone to believe that you can build a team and recruit the people and have all the resources.”
“So we said to ourselves: ‘Fine, let’s just start building the team.’ We’re building a team without a grid slot. Are you in? That’s a great pitch.”
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That naturally carries a high risk, because if the team had not been approved in the final instance, a lot of money would have been burned for nothing. But Towriss was always optimistic: “It just had to happen, given the level of commitment we had invested.”
And if not? “Plan B might have been an Amazon warehouse in this huge facility we’re building in the US,” he says.
Crucial for the final approval was also the commitment of US giant General Motors. The private Andretti project initially found no approval from Formula 1, but with a large US corporation in the background, the arguments were different. “I started to realize that a manufacturer is the way,” Towriss describes.
A meeting in front of the elevator changes everything
The meeting with General Motors was more due to chance – or a “lucky coincidence,” as the American calls it.
The whole thing happened at an event hosted by Roger Penske, owner of the IndyCar team of the same name, whose company Penske Corporation now also owns the IndyCar series itself – on the roof of a hotel in Nashville.
“The drivers are talking, we’re doing the usual. Normally we stay until the end, but after the drivers had done their part, we left a bit early because we had other events to go to,” Towriss recalls.
He took the elevator down, where he met Jim Campbell, who was responsible for General Motors’ motorsport activities and who was running late and just arriving.
“Since the event was already running upstairs, there was no one down by the elevators where we met. So we had the opportunity to talk,” says Towriss. “If I had met Jim upstairs in the middle of all those people, we wouldn’t have had a chance to talk. If there had been a lot of people in the hotel lobby, we wouldn’t have had a chance to talk.”
“But now it was just Jim and me standing there talking. I said: ‘Hey, I have this Formula 1 project I want to talk to you about.’ And he was interested,” he recalls. “Based on that conversation, we arranged a meeting for a presentation in Detroit.”
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Group CEO Mark Reuss was also there, who of course also had to be convinced first. “So we’re in Detroit, sitting in a conference room and going through the presentation. We’re finished and Mark says: ‘Good presentation. Do you want to see my car?’ And I thought to myself: ‘Oh, he’s a racer.'”
“It was great. You could feel the competitive spirit waking up in him. And the next thing I know, we’re standing in an underground garage listening to a Corvette Z06 start – a thundering start that filled the whole room with this incredible sound.”
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“And yes, that’s how it all started.”