Just over one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has required a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the United States, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any new 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 commented recently and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We want to show that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a tough opening, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now at more than 400 and planned to attain the objective of 600 swiftly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, set for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where someone has a problem and they report it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
