Just over twelve months previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's newest entrant for 2026. Establishing the team from the ground up has entailed a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the United States, with approximately a hundred days to go before they make their debut for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The CTO, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed operation in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “But then the next minute you think: ‘Well, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
Chester had success at the Renault team in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a works entry sponsored by the corporate entity, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It's unparalleled. In an well-set team you rarely get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon commented recently and while Chester echoed this he thought the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that this is a professional operation performing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we are a legitimate team, then we will focus on improvement after that.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In late summer they contracted Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair remarkable for their priceless expertise in competing at the front in two top-tier teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this team, this staff, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to a competitive level and achieve good results.”
To that end recruitment has been in full swing, with employees now reaching over 400 and planned to reach the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an HQ at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, where they are constructing the facility to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the aerodynamic facility in Germany. It is a complex structure, at odds with the direction in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Chester alluded.
Space Mission Model
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We are pragmatic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but the pressure is comparable.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the traditional management structure, a flat management structure akin to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all tackling different aspects of the program in a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager consults a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from hierarchical consent for everything is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile approach will be evaluated in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. Cadillac have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
