Just over one year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally granted the official approval as Formula One’s most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo program. As the sport descends on Vegas this weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be hosted in the United States, with just over three months to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending task, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the nascent project in early 2023 not long after it was created, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and go: ‘Incredible, isn’t this fantastic what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Nick Chester achieved victories at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical development at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an grand prix team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an accomplishment in itself,” Lowdon commented earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team executing the right things on the race track. When we prove that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in operating at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we’re realistic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and we expect most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and planned to reach the objective of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of finishing an main base at Fishers in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the direction in F1 for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“It’s highly modelled on the NASA moon mission,” remarked Lowdon just before the Silverstone race in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, they’re super, super, super short. Well, 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 non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the project at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a process where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” says Chester. “So we empower people to take charge. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
