A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, there is still a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Australia and goals are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we show up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In the summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the target of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, at odds with the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
