A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they hit the circuit 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 never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was created, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “But then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to change cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted earlier this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on progression after that.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the center to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on distinct elements of the program at a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young Californian Colton Herta