Just over a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally given the green light as F1's latest entrant for 2026. Constructing the squad from the ground up has involved a frenetic operating tempo that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo program. As Formula One converges on Las Vegas this weekend, Cadillac are aware the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be staged in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the inaugural time 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 never-ending challenge, they are conscious there will not be adequate time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed team in the spring of 2023 soon after it was established, when the organization were without even an approved entry. He has been at its center since then and gets a amused expression when considering the journey.
“There might be five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and go: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what we’ve done in under three years,’” he says. “And then the following moment you realize: ‘Yes, we’ve still got quite a lot to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester enjoyed success at Renault in the driver Fernando Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the then-new Mercedes electric racing team, but nothing has truly matched the challenge of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry supported by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Establishing an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an established team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With each passing day that passes thoughts are sharper on the approaching critical moment in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated this year and while the CTO echoed this he felt the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we belong on the grid,” he emphasizes. “So we turn up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that we are a serious contender performing 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 Drive
In late summer they signed Checo Pérez and Bottas as their racers for 2026, a tandem remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the front in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Bottas expressed the mood of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he commented. “We have a mountain of work to do, and we expect almost certainly a tough opening, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to finish last. I am confident with this structure, with this team, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to get relatively quickly to the front and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 swiftly. Complementing their current base at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of finishing an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to produce the power unit, set for 2029 – for now they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Apollo Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We have a clear-eyed view, we recognize how tough it is. The timelines, are extremely compressed. Alright, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of project teams all working on different aspects of the mission in a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor talks to a supervisor in another department, it travels back down, the process is very slow,” explains Nick Chester. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Eliminating hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The efficacy of this flexible methodology will be evaluated in the intensity of Grand Prix next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the young American Colton Herta
