Just over one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are sharper on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is no little amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
