Cadillac brought a Texan to lead a livery project about Texas, and the result looks like no Formula 1 car that has appeared at the Circuit of the Americas before. Today at the United States Grand Prix in Austin, the Cadillac Formula 1 Team is running a one-off design inspired by western wear: chain stitching, saddlery scrollwork, embroidered depictions of the Austin skyline, a map of COTA, 50 stars, cactuses, and a horseshoe positioned heels-up for good luck. The whole car looks, according to the designer who made it, like it was embroidered directly onto the bodywork.
The project started with Vincent Traina, a design manager at GM’s Performance, Motorsports and Accessories studio. Traina grew up in Dallas and has followed Formula 1 since childhood, watching European races his father would wake him up for in the early hours. When the team decided to do an Austin-specific livery, Traina was the natural choice to anchor it. His brief was to celebrate Texas and the American West without sliding into caricature, applying the same design discipline Cadillac brings to its production interiors. Clean palette, elevated execution, a little playful but credibly rooted.
The physical constraints of a Formula 1 car made that harder than it sounds. Every surface is aerodynamically purposeful, refined to the millimeter, and the airflow requirements over the bodywork leave limited areas where decorative graphics can live without creating problems. Traina’s team in Michigan coordinated with designers at the Cadillac Formula 1 Team’s technical center in the UK, where Jamie Thresher, a senior design visualization CG artist, handled the digital rendering. Thresher had to draw each individual stitch in the embroidery-effect graphic and fit it precisely within the zones the engineers permitted. “Of all the themes we came up with, this was probably the hardest one we could have picked,” he said. Rendering stitch-by-stitch detail across a car that travels at more than 200 mph is a different kind of problem than painting a logo on a hood.
The turnaround was tight. The project kicked off over the summer with a visit to GM Design in Detroit, and the finished livery had to be ready for race week. Thresher described the early deadlines as daunting before the work found its momentum. The cross-Atlantic collaboration, Michigan working with the UK team, gave the design a perspective neither group would have arrived at alone. Formula 1’s center of gravity is still firmly in England; the cultural knowledge of Texas sat entirely in Detroit.
This is the third one-off livery Cadillac has run this season. The team debuted a custom design at the Miami Grand Prix in May and another at the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in July. Cassidy Towriss, Chief Brand Advisor for the Cadillac Formula 1 Team, framed the three as a deliberate arc: Miami drew on American symbols, Silverstone explored American color, Austin now examines American character through the specific lens of the West. Whether that framing reads as a coherent creative strategy or a retroactive theme is a question the liveries themselves have to answer. The Austin car, at least, commits to a specific point of view rather than a generic flag-and-star treatment.
The detail extends to the drivers. Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez will wear custom suits that carry the western wear theme off the car, keeping the visual language consistent across the garage. The Easter eggs embedded in the livery, the skyline, the circuit map, give it something to reward a close look beyond the surface impression.
Cadillac entered Formula 1 this season as the first American constructor in decades, and the livery program has become one of the more visible expressions of how the team is building its identity. While the Cadillac road car brand has been aggressively expanding its EV lineup, the F1 program is doing parallel work on what Cadillac means as a mark, using the cars as a canvas for American identity at venues where that identity carries genuine novelty. A cowboy-stitched Formula 1 car at the Circuit of the Americas is a specific thing to be, and Cadillac has committed to it completely.
The car that gets embroidered on the outside still has to go fast on the inside. How it performs around the 20-turn, 3.4-mile Austin layout is the other half of the story this weekend.
Source: Cadillac. Images courtesy of Cadillac.
