Doug Nye: Cadillac built itself serious racing heritage before F1 bid

Only recently have I realised that marketing folk and the enthusiast-journo in me will never quite understand each other. In 2000, I remember Melbourne Airport festooned with posters bawling ‘The Cat is Back!’ in celebration of Jaguar Racing’s imminent Formula 1 debut in the Australian Grand Prix.

This must have seemed a happy phrase to celebrate Jaguar’s return to frontline road racing after its endurance titles of 1987-88 and ’91. But what ground my gears was the memory of Jaguar founder Sir William Lyons having considered World Championship GP racing in the early 1950s – but deciding against: “Grand Prix racing does not relate to our customers. Winning Le Mans does”. Five Le Mans wins later, his point made – Jaguar’s marketing people lived on those laurels for decades.

But times change. Both the market and public perception are in constant flux. Marketeers long ago appreciated there’s no need to puzzle the punter with extraneous facts. Paint and promote a big picture – and ‘near enough’ becomes king.

But some market matters remain an enduring truth. If an established participating body feels it is on to a good thing, then it’s understandably reluctant to see the spoils suddenly shared between more participants. This protective practice seemed very apparent during the recent campaign by Andretti Global, with GM backing, to enter current Formula 1.

Back in 1999-2000, Jaguar Racing had emerged when Ford bought and renamed Stewart Racing after its three-season career – only to suffer for five dismal years more.  Through 2021-22, Michael Andretti and his backers talked of taking over an existing team before gaining GM backing to bring the Cadillac brand to F1. Still they have faced many hurdles, not least the FIA expressing itself content with the existing 10-team 20-cars circus while – just for once – Christian Horner of Red Bull Racing (née-Stewart, ex-Jaguar Racing) candidly declared the real problem would be “wider distribution of profits”.

Current marketing forces to include an all-American F1 team must be immense. Despite poor Michael Andretti making a rather sorry impression as a single-season F1 McLaren driver in 1993, his assorted teams have since won the Indy ‘500’ six times, plus five CART and Indycar Championship titles. But Cadillac – regarded as talismanic among the American motor industry – has had little significant competition history until recent times.

Only three American marques, two of them Oldsmobile and Buick, were older than Cadillac (established 1902). It grew from engineer Henry M Leland having been engaged as a liquidation appraiser by Henry Ford’s original company backers after the old monster had walked out. Leland sold the financiers the notion of continuing with an engine of his own design. The name derived from French explorer Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, the founder of Detroit.

Leland was a precision engineer, his cars beautifully built, parts truly interchangeable. They soon had a fine reputation. GM bought the operation in 1909, by which time Cadillac was rated as highly as Rolls-Royce or Daimler. Its cutting-edge advances would include full electrics, synchromesh ‘clashless’ manual transmission, fine early V8 engines, and its slogan ‘Standard of the World’ was well-founded. Cadillac was GM’s flagship.

“Melbourne Airport was festooned with posters bawling ‘The Cat is Back!’”

But international racing? For many years – just like Rolls-Royce – Cadillac’s record was negligible. In 1939 Eleuterio Donzini’s Cadillac V16 won the Rafaela 500-Miles in Argentina. The exception came in 1949-50 when millionaire ‘car guy’ Briggs Cunningham decided that America should contest Le Mans once more – à la Stutz and Chrysler in the 1930s. He was racing a Fordillac – a Ford chassis powered by the latest 351-cubic inch Cadillac V8, and built by Bill Frick and Phil Walters. Phil had been an assault glider pilot captured at Arnhem and as a midget racer had used the pseudonym ‘Ted Tappet’ – hence Frick-Tappet Motors. Briggs wanted to run Fordillacs at Le Mans but the ACO forbade such hybrids. So instead he bought two showroom 1950 Cadillac Series 61 Coupes. One was stripped to carry Frick-Tappet’s own open-cockpit aerodynamic bodywork styled by Grumman aerodynamicists, the other car running stock. The French nicknamed the streamliner ‘Le Monstre’ and the heeling, squealing Coupe ‘Le Petit Pataud’ – in effect ‘the clumsy puppy’. They finished that 1950 24 Hours 10th and 11th.

Forward 50 years. GM’s marketing men committed Cadillac to serious racing with its Northstar series of V8 engines in initially Riley & Scott-built LMP and later Nigel Stroud-designed sports-prototype chassis from 2000-02 when the programme was cancelled in favour of the Chevrolet Corvette. After a 15-year hiatus the 2017 Cadillac DPi-VR sports-prototype Coupe then emerged with a Dallara P217 chassis and naturally-aspirated V8 engine. This and its successors have since shone, winning the IMSA Manufacturers’ title in 2017-18 and ’21 and four consecutive Daytona 24-Hour races 2017-20.

As a sometime Cadillac driver, oh yes, of ‘Le Monstre’ – with its weird five carburettors on a V8 engine, the body lines and volume of a landing craft, and ‘three-on-the-tree’ gearchange – I can now understand how this racing late-comer’s record has partly fulfilled those marketing men’s dreams. Hence F1 next?

Doug Nye is the UK’s leading motor racing historian and has been writing authoritatively about the sport since the 1960s