Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has involved a hectic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “But then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Creating an F1 team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the chance to change team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the impending decisive point in Australia and targets are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” the team principal noted recently and while Chester shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In August they recruited Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in competing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident given this organization, with this group, this staff, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now at over 400 and intended to reach the goal of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to produce the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organization, contrary to the movement in the sport for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that leader consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
