A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic operation in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's title-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted this year and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We’re realistic, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
