A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over 100 days to go before they make their debut for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean challenge, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, what an achievement what we’ve done in under three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the parent company, General Motors, into Formula One.
“Building 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 rarely get the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation executing the right things on the circuit. After we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate progression from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of finishing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said the team principal ahead of the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“When you must follow a procedure where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a considerable amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
