A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender doing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to produce the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the direction in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of specialist groups all working on different aspects of the program in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that manager talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
