Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with just over three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and gets a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you realize: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the task of launching the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from nothing, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Australia and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the race track. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri as their pilots for 2026, a pair remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with personnel now at in excess of 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the organization are in the process of building an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, contrary to the trend in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in July. “We’re realistic, we understand how challenging it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of project teams all working on different aspects of the project across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their manager, that leader talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “We give authority to people to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
