Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the United States, with around a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on various components of the mission at a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader talks to a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to people to take charge. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
