A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally granted the green light as Formula One’s newest entry for 2026. Constructing the team from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the America, with around a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent operation in March 2023 shortly after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the ride.
“You can have five minutes reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Well, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the mission of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team sponsored by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from scratch, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that elapses thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we function efficiently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In the summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver echoed the sentiment of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to the front and taste victory.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an headquarters at Fishers in Indy and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to build the power unit, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has led to the innovative team culture to which the CTO alluded.
NASA Inspiration
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon ahead of the Silverstone race in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the program at a variety of locations.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a manager somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Eliminating managerial sign-off for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this agile approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
