Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when reflecting on the experience.
“There might be a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you think: ‘Well, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you rarely get the chance to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming 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 stated earlier this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we intend to prove is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the circuit. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. In my view given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with staff now at more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on different aspects of the program in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they raise it up to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader in another department, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for each action is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
