Approximately twelve months in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Building the squad from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are more focused on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the circuit. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with employees now up to more than 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 rapidly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, contrary to the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the young Californian Colton Herta
