Just over twelve months ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each day that passes minds are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission in a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that manager communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
