Just over one year in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for 2026. Building the organization from nothing has entailed a intense work rate that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As F1 arrives on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the last event of the championship to be hosted in the America, with approximately a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in March 2023 soon after it was formed, when the squad were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its core from that point and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a short period reflecting at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you think: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's victorious campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has been quite like the mission of bringing the iconic American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry sponsored by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an grand prix team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each day that goes by thoughts are sharper on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that any incoming team joining the grid is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” the team principal noted earlier this year and while the CTO echoed this he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” he says. “In order that we turn up and we function efficiently. We want to show that this is a professional operation executing the proper actions on the race track. Once we prove that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a pair notable for their invaluable experience in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull and the Mercedes team, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to remain at the rear. In my view with this structure, with this group, these personnel, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now reaching in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the objective of 600 members rapidly. Complementing their present headquarters at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indy and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are building the facility to manufacture the new engine, set for the 2029 season – for now they will use power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate organisation, different from the movement in the sport for increased consolidation, and has inspired the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
NASA Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, they’re super, super, super short. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, instead of the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a range of project teams all tackling various components of the project in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding managerial sign-off for everything is far more efficient and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile strategy will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
