Just over twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the squad from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the America, with approximately three months to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are conscious there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You can have five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you think: ‘Well, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Establishing an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are more focused on the looming critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being managed.
“One must presume that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while Chester shared this view he felt the squad had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this setup, with this group, these personnel, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now up to over 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their present headquarters at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal ahead of the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
