Just over a full year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the go-ahead as F1's latest entry for 2026. Establishing the squad from the ground up has required a intense operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and has a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You might get a short period thinking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the next minute you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that any new team entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the proper actions on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we aim to demonstrate improvement subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a duo notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view with this setup, with this group, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are developing the center to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
NASA Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how challenging it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. OK, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling different aspects of the project in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
