Approximately one year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get a short period looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon stated this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender doing the proper actions on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
