A little more than a full year ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as F1's most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the team from nothing has involved a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent team in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“There might be a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Nick Chester enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by minds are sharper on the approaching decisive point in Melbourne and goals are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we function efficiently. We want to show that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the attitude of combative optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 members quickly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” said the team principal just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
