A little more than a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for 2026. Building the squad from scratch has required a intense operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the season to be staged in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Nick Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that goes by thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team coming in is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team performing the correct procedures on the track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we won't be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to more than 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of six hundred quickly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, contrary to the trend in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all working on various components of the mission at a variety of locations.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they raise it up to their supervisor, that supervisor consults a manager in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” says Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
The Future
The success of this flexible methodology will be proven in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
