Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has involved a intense pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne 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 not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being handled.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. After we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their vast knowledge in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now at more than 400 and scheduled to attain the target of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the trend in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the mission at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
