A little more than one year in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As F1 converges on Vegas this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be hosted in the US, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne 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 endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the nascent project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a wry smile when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what you’ve done and go: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Challenge
Chester achieved victories at the Renault team in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of introducing the iconic American Cadillac name, a factory team supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the opportunity to transform organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are sharper on the looming moment of truth in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Nick Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we function efficiently. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the circuit. Once we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri as their drivers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he commented. “We have a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 quickly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the squad are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, planned for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the direction in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British GP in mid-season. “We are pragmatic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the program across a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they raise it up to their supervisor, that manager talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
