A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has entailed a frenetic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they hit the circuit 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 sisyphean challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart from that point and gets a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this structure, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on different aspects of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
