A little more than one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he believed the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the proper actions on the circuit. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organization, different from the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” stated Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all focusing on different aspects of the project across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
