A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last granted the official approval as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from scratch has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One arrives on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Well, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an grand prix team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and intended to hit the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project at a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
