Approximately one year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we’ve done in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “In order that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the correct procedures on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the target of 600 quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of building an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the center to build the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling distinct elements of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Avoiding management approval for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
