Approximately one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to attain the goal of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
