Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as F1's most recent entry for 2026. Building the organization from scratch has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a knowing grin when considering the journey.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In late summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with employees now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred rapidly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, different from the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all focusing on distinct elements of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
