Approximately a full year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Building the squad from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with approximately 100 days to go before they make their debut for the first 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 sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a knowing grin when thinking about the experience.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he says. “But then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“One must presume that any new team coming in is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he felt the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we want to show progression subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their priceless expertise in performing at the front in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We have a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, these personnel, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end hiring has been in top gear, with employees now at over 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred rapidly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the 2029 engine, set for the 2029 season – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo project,” said Lowdon shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all tackling various components of the program at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that leader communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for all decisions is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have signed as their test driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
