How Neil Armstrong is inspiring Cadillac's F1 moonshot

At its absolute peak, Project Apollo employed around 400,000 Americans in the far easier said than done goal of "landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the Earth,” by the end of the 1960s. 

Today, just as the 56th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing their Lunar Module Eagle approaches and the taking of their small steps, Cadillac's F1 team is preparing to make the giant leap and join the grand prix grid. 

The engineering might of Apollo is often held up as one of the greatest scientific feats, especially when you consider humans went from their first spaceflight in April 1961 to being gripped by the grainy TV footage from the lunar surface just eight years later in July 1969.

Much like Cadillac's F1 project being led by former Marussia boss Greame Lowdon, the Americans had to start from basically zero. As well as inventing materials and new spacecraft, they also had to invent management structures, processes, and procedures, without which Armstrong and the other 11 men who walked on the moon wouldn't have got anywhere near a launchpad.

And as Lowdon explained to select media including RacingNews365 during a recent behind-the-scenes tour of its UK base at Silvestone, Apollo is Cadillac's guide to how to build from scratch. 

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Cadillac's operation is split across four bases in the United States and the UK. 

Its main base, once fully opened early next year, will be in Fishers, Indiana, with further hubs in North Carolina, Michigan, and at Silverstone, near to Aston Martin's brand-new state-of-the-art factory. 

This Silverstone hub will focus on technical, production and logistics centres, with the structure of the team further complicated by the team using Toyota's wind-tunnel in Cologne, Germany - a facility once used by McLaren before it upgraded its own. 

When questioned by RacingNews365 about the scale of the challenge in getting all of these facilities and the near 600 personnel to communicate effectively, Lowdon referenced how he had built his philosophy on Apollo. 

"If you look at the task in hand, we've got immovable deadlines, we've got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction, so we need engineers talking to engineers," Lowdon explained. 

"We need an engineer here talking to an engineer in Charlotte and another in Michigan, or eventually in Fishers, and so we've looked to have a very flat management structure, and it is highly modelled on the Apollo project.

"Okay, we're not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes. We've leaned heavily on the management structures that were used for the Apollo project, and I don't know if other teams have used that before.

"Race teams are often described in military terms, and organised in a pyramid, and you have one person at the top who issues commands, and people do things, but when you have multiple sites, that is a massive challenge.

"We have mission control instead of command and control, so it is a flat structure where engineers are able to talk to each other directly, and everyone knows what the mission is.

"We've split the business into 12 distinct offices, and they all communicate with each other, and totally geographically agnostic, it doesn't matter where you are."

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Cadillac's plan to enter F1

Despite its complexity, Project Apollo had a rather simple management structure. 

The NASA Administrator James Webb hired an engineer named George Mueller to head up the Office of Manned Spaceflight, with Mueller then getting Air Force General Samuel Phillips as the Apollo program director. 

Everything fed into Phillips from the Saturn V rocket to the spacesuits to the food the astronauts would eat. 

Whereas this took part over the best part of a decade, Cadillac has been operating on a far tighter schedule. 

From the FIA opening the Expression of Interest period in January 2023 to receiving formal acceptance for its bid was 764 days, leaving the team exactly one year, minus one day, to be ready for the first race in Australia for F1's new era on March 8, 2026. 

That does not count pre-season testing, which starts with a behind-closed-doors outing in Barcelona at the end of January. 

Key milestones such as the first floor, the steering wheel and the crash tests have been passed, each taking the team one small step closer to the ultimate goal. 

As Lowdon himself states, the "proof in the pudding" of whether this bold giant leap will be either Apollo 11 or Apollo 13, will come on the grid in Australia on the second Sunday of March 2026.