A little more than a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the challenge of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is much smoother and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
