A little more than a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the official approval as Formula One’s latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the US, with around a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Chester shared this view he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the race track. After we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now up to over 400 and scheduled to reach the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
