A little more than one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be held in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of the mid-2000s and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and planned to hit the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, contrary to the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, 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 akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “So we empower team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
