Approximately twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time 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 cognizant there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core from that point and enjoys a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching over 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of finishing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble methodology will be proven in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta
