Approximately a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were at last awarded the green light as F1's newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a intense pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core ever since and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from the ground up, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each day that passes minds are sharper on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, at odds with the trend in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, 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 implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their manager, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
