A little more than one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the green light as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a hectic work rate that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they hit the circuit for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending challenge, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 soon after it was formed, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when considering the ride.
“There might be five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in less than three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you realize: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
Chester achieved victories at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the opportunity to change organizational mindset.”
With each day that goes by focus are more focused on the impending critical moment in Australia and expectations are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he felt the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we show up and we operate well. We want to show that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Recruitment Push
In late summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely 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, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to advance swiftly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to reach the objective of six hundred quickly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the squad are in the process of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the center to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, different from the movement in F1 for increased consolidation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of NASA's, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the project across a different facilities.
“If you have to go through a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this agile methodology will be tested in the pressure of racing next season and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
