A little more than twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately given the go-ahead as the world of Formula One's latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has required a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track 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 not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a amused expression when considering the ride.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has truly matched the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any incoming team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon commented this year and while the CTO echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. When we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be 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, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the goal of 600 members rapidly. Alongside their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the phase of finishing an main base at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the facility to build the power unit, set for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a decentralized management similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the project across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where an issue arises and they report it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
