Just over a full year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as Formula One’s newest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from the ground up has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with approximately three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are aware there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the embryonic project in March 2023 not long after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center from that point and gets a wry smile when considering the experience.
“You might get a brief moment thinking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “Then the very next instant you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the iconic American Cadillac name, a works entry sponsored by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into F1.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you won't have the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses focus are sharper on the approaching decisive point in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“One must presume that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the right things on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In August they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in operating at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to finish last. I believe given this organization, with this team, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in full swing, with employees now at in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of six hundred rapidly. In addition to their current base at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of completing an main base at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organization, different from the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” stated Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a variety of project teams all tackling various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” notes Nick Chester. “So we empower team members to handle things directly. Moving away from management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a significant degree on the line for F1, too. Cadillac have signed as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
