A little more than twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the go-ahead as F1's latest entry for the 2026 season. Building the squad from scratch has required a hectic work rate that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport descends on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac understand the clock is ticking.
The Tight Timeline to Melbourne
At the season finale of the campaign to be held in the United States, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, became part of the embryonic team in early 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a wry smile when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in a short three-year period,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has quite compared with the task of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Building an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you rarely get the chance to alter team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the looming decisive point in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he felt the squad had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We aim to demonstrate that we’re a proper team doing the correct procedures on the race track. Once we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Drive
In August they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for 2026, a pair distinguished for their vast knowledge in performing at the sharp end in two top-tier teams, Red Bull and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he commented. “There’s going to be a massive task to do, and it’s going to be most likely a difficult start, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. I believe given this organization, with this group, these people, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in overdrive, with personnel now reaching in excess of 400 and planned to hit the objective of 600 members swiftly. Alongside their present headquarters at Silverstone, the team are in the process of building an HQ at Fishers, Indiana in Indianapolis and there is the GM plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are building the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a intricate organization, different from the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has prompted the new cultural approach to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said the team principal shortly before the Silverstone race in July. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of Nasa’s, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all working on distinct elements of the program at a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor communicates with a leader somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for all decisions is far more efficient and more rapid.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this agile strategy will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for the sport, too. Cadillac have taken on as their reserve driver the 25-year-old American Colton Herta
