There was an understandable feeling of disappointment and frustration within the Cadillac garage at the conclusion of last month’s 24 Hours of Le Mans.Its cars had led 184 laps of the race at the Circuit de la Sarthe, more than any other manufacturer. The trio in the #12 Cadillac, Louis Delétraz, Will Stevens and Norman Nato, combined for 128 of those laps heading the field, only to cross the line fourth, 32 seconds off the winning Toyota.It was the closest Cadillac had come to winning Le Mans, the famed endurance race, which also forms one-third of the ‘Triple Crown of Motorsport’ along with the Indianapolis 500 and Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix.Cadillac’s owner, General Motors, is in rare territory with its racing programs. While many manufacturers focus on one or two series, GM wants to win all three ‘Triple Crown’ races one day. Besides Cadillac’s involvement in F1 and the World Endurance Championship (WEC) — the sports car series that includes Le Mans — sister brand Chevrolet races as a manufacturer in IndyCar.“Only one company has ever done it, McLaren, and only one driver, Graham Hill, has done it,” Eric Warren, GM’s vice-president of global motorsports competition, told The Athletic last month.“It’s something unique that we’ll be looking to put up on our shelf at some point as well.”GM has tasted plenty of success at the Indy 500, powering the winning car 13 times, most recently in 2024. But its push to win at Le Mans and in F1 are much more recent. Cadillac entered the top class at Le Mans from 2023 under the new Hypercar regulations, giving it the chance to compete for the outright win, and got onto the F1 grid from this year with its start-up team.Warren recognized it was “going to take some time in F1” to get to the front, given the scale of the competition and the fact Cadillac had to form a team from scratch. It has been no surprise that its cars have spent the start of the new season toward the rear of the field.Cadillac’s WEC program has already proved it can compete for the highest honors. The team scored its first win at last year’s 6 Hours of Sao Paulo, recording a 1-2 finish, and took pole at Le Mans last year. It looked poised for a repeat at Le Mans last month after Jack Aitken set the fastest time in the #38 car in qualifying, only to lose it thanks to a penalty. Cadillac will return to Interlagos, the track in Sao Paulo, for this weekend’s 6-hour race with the goal of making up for the disappointment of its Le Mans near-miss.Cadillac will hope to make up for the disappointment of Le Mans at this weekend’s 6-hour race in Interlagos. (Ivan Couturier / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images)The Cadillac V.Series-R car was designed in conjunction with Dallara, the Italian chassis manufacturer, to meet the Le Mans Daytona h set of technical regulations. The WEC team has been operated by Jota Sport, a British squad based out of Kent on the east coast of England, since the start of 2025. Experience runs deep wherever you look.But it’s GM’s reach across racing disciplines and championships that is an extra boost for the Cadillac WEC squad. Much of that comes from the technical support offered from its main technical center in Charlotte, allowing for a helpful cross-pollination of resources (where allowed by series’ regulations), personnel and, crucially, brain power over different series.Sam Hignett, the co-founder of Jota Sport, told The Athletic GM did “a brilliant job of pooling all their motorsport knowledge” together across its various championships. “It’s something we’ve learned in our relationship with GM and Cadillac,” he said. “We can learn so much more from other pieces of motorsport.”It’s not only GM’s involvement in IndyCar and F1 that feeds this pool of information. Its brands are also involved in NASCAR, truck racing, drag racing and off-roading.“It’s an enormous brain trust of motorsport,” said Hignett. “I love the way everybody has to have their eyes open to, ‘actually, what can we learn from NASCAR or IndyCar or the Baja (Rally) trucks and things like that? We can learn stuff from them, no doubt.”Hignett explained how Cadillac’s WEC team had tapped into the knowledge from Chevrolet in NASCAR to manage logistics, highlighting how the non-stop NASCAR schedule would require numerous chassis to be built and prepared at once for a run of races. From Chevrolet’s Indy 500 efforts, Hignett said the team had learned more about readying a car for the single biggest race of the year to support its Le Mans preparations. That’s before the technical crossovers that can also apply to different categories.“It’s distilling all of that information on the science experiments, if you like, the tire modelling and the chassis building and the (vehicle) dynamics,” Hignett said. “IndyCar (engineers) are masters of dampers. So we’ve got this amazing hub of knowledge sat in Charlotte at the GM tech center, where all the knowledge, all the specialisations from various series get distilled down and then distilled out to the other series.”At the core of this knowledge are the people. Warren said that engineers and designers who have been involved in WEC may be keen to explore avenues in F1, and vice-versa.Not only can Cadillac tap into a wider source of talent, but it can also offer opportunities that other teams may not have with alternative roles or future pathways. Engineers who may not want to keep up the intense travel of a 24-race F1 season could look to a less demanding calendar. WEC’s schedule only features eight races.“By racing in all the top level platforms, you get an opportunity to have a broader understanding of where are the actual good engineers, what makes good engineers,” Warren said.“We try to use that to develop talent that potentially the F1 team would look to, but also to find people that maybe wanted to get out of F1 at a different time, or have a potential safety net, and give people new opportunities.”Hignett said there had been “bits and pieces of knowledge transfer” from the Cadillac F1 program’s work so far, but more is coming.“Hopefully we sit down again next year and I have plenty of knowledge and stories to tell of how the F1 team has helped us, and hopefully, we can do our little bit and help the F1 team as well,” Hignett said.Cadillac knows it has a mountain to climb with its F1 program, given the might of teams like Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull, all of whom have decades of experience and success to enact at their high-end facilities. The commitment and ambition from GM, which is a shareholder in the Cadillac team, is there to get to the top, but it will take time.The WEC program is on a smaller scale and races to tighter regulations — unlike F1, the car does not change dramatically every year — which would appear to make success easier to come by. Yet the competition remains fierce, evidenced by a 32-second deficit over 24 hours only being enough for fourth place at Le Mans.It makes every extra nugget of information all the more crucial to make a difference on the race track. And with so much reach across motorsports through GM, Cadillac will feel it surely has an edge that many of its rivals cannot replicate as easily.Alex Kalinauckas contributed to this report.