Just over one year in the past at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entrant for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has involved a hectic work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the season to be hosted in the United States, with approximately 100 days 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 sisyphean task, they are conscious there will never be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed team in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when reflecting on the experience.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical direction at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac marque, a factory team supported by the owner, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the opportunity to alter cultural approach.”
With each day that elapses thoughts are more focused on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team coming in is probably going to finish last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while Nick Chester echoed this he believed the squad had a statement to make as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Push
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the organization are in the process of building an main base at Fishers in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the 2029 engine, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the trend in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which the CTO alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how difficult it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling different aspects of the mission across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this flexible methodology will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
