Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s most recent entry for 2026. Constructing the organization from nothing has entailed a frenetic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this race weekend, Cadillac know the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 season opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in March 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its center ever since and has a amused expression when thinking about the journey.
“You might get a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform team culture.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the looming moment of truth in the Australian GP and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we should be there,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the right things on the track. When we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show progression after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In the summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be probably a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I believe with this setup, with this team, these people, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to more than 400 and intended to attain the target of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in North Carolina, where they are building the facility to build the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari power units – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a intricate organisation, at odds with the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on various components of the program at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor consults a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and quicker.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this flexible methodology will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
