Approximately twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s most recent entrant for the 2026 season. Constructing the squad from nothing has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the last event of the season to be held in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean endeavor, they are conscious there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, came aboard the newly formed project in the spring of 2023 not long after it was created, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You can have a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “Then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, there is still quite a lot to do.’”
A One-of-a-Kind Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the then-new Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has truly matched the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “There's nothing comparable. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to change cultural approach.”
With each day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching moment of truth in Australia and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “So that we arrive and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation doing the correct procedures on the track. When we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Driver Lineup and Hiring Drive
In August they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in operating at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the attitude of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. I believe with this setup, with these individuals, these people, there is every reason that we can't manage to progress rapidly to the front and enjoy some success.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with employees now reaching more than 400 and intended to attain the goal of 600 rapidly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of completing an headquarters at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to produce the new engine, planned for the 2029 season – for now they will run Ferrari power units – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the direction in the sport 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 program,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how tough 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 adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of specialist groups all focusing on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that leader talks to a manager in another department, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” explains Chester. “We give authority to staff to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and faster.”
Upcoming Challenges
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be proven in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their test driver the emerging American Colton Herta
