Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as F1's most recent participant for 2026. Constructing the squad from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be held in the United States, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the first time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are cognizant there will never be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent project in March 2023 soon after it was created, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core from that point and has a amused expression when considering the experience.
“You can have a short period looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in a short three-year period,’” Chester states. “But then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Challenge
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the corporate entity, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we turn up and we operate well. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the right things on the circuit. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement after that.”
Pilot Selection and Hiring Push
In August they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a tandem notable for their priceless expertise in performing at the sharp end in two championship-winning squads, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and the Finnish driver expressed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” he said. “We have a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But our goal isn't to finish last. I believe with this structure, with these individuals, this staff, there is every reason that we shouldn’t be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in top gear, with personnel now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the objective of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the process of finishing an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the plant to produce the new engine, set for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne, Germany. It is a intricate structure, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the innovative team culture to which Chester referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the British GP in July. “We are pragmatic, we know how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, instead of the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of NASA's, where there were a range of specialist groups all tackling various components of the program across a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that leader communicates with a manager in another department, it is relayed back, the process is very slow,” explains the CTO. “So we empower people to really get on with it. Eliminating management approval for all decisions is far more efficient and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this nimble approach will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix when the season begins and there is a significant degree at stake for F1, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
