Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from the ground up has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being managed.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the circuit. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these personnel, it's entirely possible we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of completing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we recognize how challenging it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says the CTO. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
