Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the official approval as the world of Formula One's latest entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from the ground up has entailed a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the US, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed team in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the race track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Drive
In late summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a duo remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and we expect probably a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains the CTO. “We give authority to staff to really get on with it. Eliminating managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
