Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the team from scratch has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As the sport arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the chance to change organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex organization, contrary to the direction in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Apollo Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the project at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “So we empower staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
