A little more than twelve months in the past at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last given the official approval as Formula One’s newest entrant for 2026. Building the team from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As F1 descends on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac understand the deadline is approaching.
The Race Against Time to Melbourne
At the final race of the campaign to be held in the America, with around 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 season opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a sisyphean task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic operation in early 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when considering the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the very next instant you consider: ‘Yeah, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s title-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the challenge of bringing the iconic American Cadillac brand, a works entry backed by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into Formula One.
“Establishing an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “There's nothing comparable. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter organizational mindset.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in Australia and expectations are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO shared this view he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we want to show is that we belong on the grid,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we perform competently. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation executing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Hiring Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” he said. “We face a massive task to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident with this setup, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in overdrive, with employees now reaching over 400 and intended to attain the objective of six hundred quickly. In addition to their current base at the UK base, the squad are in the midst of completing an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indy and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, where they are building the plant to manufacture the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex structure, contrary to the movement in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester alluded.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. OK, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have implemented, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the program in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager consults a supervisor somewhere else, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “We give authority to team members to really get on with it. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is so much cleaner and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this nimble approach will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is no little amount at stake for the sport, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the 25-year-old Californian Colton Herta
