Though approval came only in March, preparations started long before.
Wind tunnel work has been ongoing since the middle of last year and the first car floor was delivered in January. Roll hoop testing took place in May and a prototype steering wheel was also ready by then.
“We’ve already issued somewhere in the region of 6,000 drawings. We’ve made 10,000 components already while we’ve been kind of quiet,” said Lowdon. “If you just wait until you get the entry and then start doing everything that we’ve been doing, you time out. It becomes an impossible task.”
Cadillac have sites on two continents — a headquarters under construction in Indianapolis, manufacturing facilities in North Carolina and Michigan and a design and logistics base at Silverstone.
Lowdon, a previous CEO of the defunct Virgin and Marussia teams, said a different management approach was needed and he had “leaned heavily” on the structure used by the US space programme in the 1960s and 70s.
“We need an engineer here [in Britain] talking to an engineer in Charlotte and another one in Warren, Michigan, or eventually in Fishers [Indiana]. So we’ve looked to have a very, very flat management structure,” he said.
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project … OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”