A little more than one year ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were ultimately granted the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from scratch has involved a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be staged in the America, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in early 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its center ever since and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in less than three years,’” Chester states. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's title-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of technical development at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the looming moment of truth in Australia and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while Chester shared this view he thought the team had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a duo remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to finish last. I believe given this organization, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will run power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all tackling various components of the project in a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a procedure where an issue arises and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor consults a manager at a different location, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “We give authority to staff to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The efficacy of this flexible strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
