When Cadillac began searching for a race team manager ahead of its 2026 Formula 1 debut, it identified Peter Crolla at Haas as the ideal candidate almost immediately.
Crolla had spent over nine years at Haas, which itself was F1’s previous start-up team when it entered the championship in 2016, and he was ready for a fresh challenge.
The prospect of building another team from the ground up appealed enormously, and following conversations with Graeme Lowdon, the driving force behind Cadillac’s debut, Crolla signed on.
“I’d been at Haas for over nine years at that point, and I was definitely ready for a change and a new challenge, and I needed something to get my excitement back for the sport,” Crolla said.
He described the nine-month construction period as the most enjoyable stretch of his entire career, starting from an empty building and a plan before gradually assembling a fully operational race team.
“That nine-month period was probably the most enjoyable of my career, from starting with an empty building and a plan, and being given that authority to create your vision,” Crolla explained.
Crolla sat down with fellow new hires, logistics manager Pete Simmons and chief mechanic Nathan Divey, to map out everything required for the journey to Melbourne and the opening race of the season.
That collaborative process covered hardware acquisition, trackside procedures, car builds, pitstop practices, and an enormous range of operational challenges that would test even experienced outfits with decades of history.
Recruitment proved particularly demanding, with the realities of F1’s lengthy notice periods forcing Cadillac to move aggressively to secure the people it needed well ahead of time.
“Recruitment was something that we had to be quite aggressive on because people were already on long notice periods,” Crolla noted, adding that no one in the sport is typically available in under three months.
Many hires joined in the second half of 2025 and were given no grace period, immediately confronted with a relentless workload as equipment arrived daily and deadlines loomed with unforgiving regularity.
Crolla was clear with recruits about exactly what joining a start-up operation would mean, ensuring no one arrived expecting the comfort of an established team like Mercedes or Ferrari.
“This is not going to be a nine-to-five cruise. It’s digging deep and being in it for the long run,” he said, summarising the mentality required to thrive within the Cadillac environment.
Cadillac met every internal and external deadline on its road to the grid, completing winter testing and finishing its opening race in Australia, though reliability struggles have since presented significant ongoing challenges.
“Those were not easy milestones to reach. There was literally blood, sweat, and tears for all of them,” Crolla reflected, describing how the first car turning laps in Silverstone felt like a genuine moment of collective achievement.
Austria was singled out as a particular low point during the season, though Crolla maintained that nothing the team has experienced has fallen outside what he originally anticipated the journey would involve.
With Marcin Budkowski now installed as team principal following Lowdon’s departure, Cadillac is also preparing to open a brand-new US headquarters in Indiana next year alongside an expansion of its Silverstone base.
“We’re doing a good job with it, but we’re only just getting started,” Crolla added, making clear that the act of going racing was never the destination, but simply another stage in a much longer journey.