Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of introducing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the looming critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view with this structure, with this group, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on various components of the program across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the heat of competition next season and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
