This time last week, it was announced by our client, the Cadillac Formula 1 Team, which will be joining the F1 grid in 2026 as the sport’s 11th team, that it had signed Valtteri Bottas and Sergio ‘Checo’ Pérez as its first-ever drivers. With 526 Grand Prix starts, 106 podium finishes, and 16 victories between them, Valtteri and Checo form one of the most experienced and most successful driver pairings on the grid – not bad for a brand-new team, huh?
Diagonal Comms was at Cadillac F1’s Silverstone factory to assist in running the comms/PR, and content creation operation of driver announcement day. Here’s what went into coordinating the release of the summer’s biggest piece of F1 news.
It was all systems go as we travelled to the heart of motorsport in the United Kingdom for a full day of media activities. The first job was sharing the exciting signing of Valtteri and Checo with the people hard at work bringing Cadillac F1 to the grid – its talented and ever-growing team of staff. Messages from Team Principal Graeme Lowdon and drivers Valtteri and Checo introduced the news to applause and raised glasses, before Diagonal’s Managing Director, Matt Bishop, hosted a live Q&A with Cadillac F1 Executive Engineer, Pat Symonds, who has a long and storied career in F1 and most recently worked as the Formula 1 Chief Technical Officer before joining the Cadillac F1 project.
The Q&A was a chance for our team to help establish consistency in Cadillac F1’s internal messaging, share valuable insights and updates, and answer any questions from the staff. Prior to announcement day, we helped prepare Pat for his communication engagements – both internal and external – to ensure the effective promotion of the team’s key messages. Our team was also in action with a camera in-hand, recording the session and taking pictures for Cadillac F1’s social media channels.
Following the staff briefing, it was time for our team to publicly share the news of Valtteri and Checo’s signing. Utilising our extensive blackbook of motorsport contacts and decades of building connections inside the F1 paddock, we distributed a press release, which included quotes from Valtteri, Checo, Graeme, and TWG CEO Dan Towriss. The articles soon began to come flooding in, providing Cadillac F1 with masses of coverage across mainstream motorsport, sport, business, lifestyle, and fashion media across print, digital, and broadcast platforms. Once the news was out, we welcomed to Silverstone F1’s exclusive UK television rights holder, Sky Sports and its F1 presenter, Craig Slater, who interviewed Pat.
As an American team with bases on both sides of the Atlantic, the Cadillac F1 comms/PR operation was also in full swing in the United States. Following a press conference with key figures from the team’s shareholders GM and TWG Global the day prior, and shortly after we distributed the official press release, Valtteri and Checo arrived at ABC’s Times Square studio to discuss their new roles when they went live on Good Morning America to hundreds of thousands of viewers across the US.
The duo – who hail from Nastola, Finland, and Guadalajara, Mexico, respectively – had a busy schedule on their hands, and soon jumped into a virtual press conference alongside Graeme, which our team moderated. After introductory questions from Matt, Valtteri, Checo, and Graeme were quizzed by a suite of eager top-tier journalists, further pushing Cadillac F1 and its central messages into key outlets.
Our team remained hard at work conducting media liaison to ensure that journalists from across the globe had their questions answered and requests fulfilled as ‘announcement day’ drew to a close. The media response to the most recent milestone on Cadillac F1’s journey to the 2026 Australian Grand Prix was staggering – our team helped attract coverage of the American outfit, its key spokespeople, and key messages on a truly massive scale, defining the lineup announcement as one of the largest pieces of sporting news of the summer.