A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as F1's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now at more than 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
