Just over a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the go-ahead as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from nothing has required a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a amused expression when considering the ride.
“There might be a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the chance to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal stated this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred quickly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the project in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
