Just over twelve months ago at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has required a hectic operating tempo that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the last event of the campaign to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when considering the journey.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious seasons of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has truly matched the challenge of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes minds are increasingly concentrated on the impending critical moment in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team joining the grid is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So that we arrive and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the race track. After we prove that we’re really credible, then we want to show forward movement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Effort
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Naturally, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. I am confident with this setup, with this team, these people, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in top gear, with personnel now at over 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of 600 members quickly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the plant to build the new engine, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated structure, different from the direction in the sport for more centralization, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred to.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo program,” said Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British GP in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have adopted, rather than the traditional management structure, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the project across a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a leader in another department, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
