Just over twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be held in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to transform team culture.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect 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 achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, contrary to the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked the team principal ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
