A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as Formula One’s newest participant for 2026. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the ride.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating 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 existing team you won't have the opportunity to change team culture.”
With every day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “In order that we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 members quickly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program across a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “So we empower team members to take charge. Eliminating management approval for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
