Approximately a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately given the official approval as F1's most recent participant for the 2026 season. Constructing the organization from the ground up has required a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 converges on Las Vegas this race weekend, the team understand time is getting tight.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be staged in the US, with around 100 days to go before they make their debut for the maiden outing in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be adequate time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the nascent team in March 2023 shortly after it was established, when the team were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a knowing grin when thinking about the journey.
“There might be a brief moment reflecting at what you’ve done and think: ‘Wow, how impressive what the team has created in less than three years,’” Chester states. “And then the very next instant you think: ‘Yes, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's title-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in charge of technical direction at the recently formed Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the challenge of bringing the all-American Cadillac name, a manufacturer-backed entry backed by the parent company, General Motors, into F1.
“Building an grand prix team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he observes. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you rarely get the chance to transform team culture.”
With every day that goes by focus are sharper on the impending critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is going to be last but merely participating will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Nick Chester agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“Our primary goal we intend to prove is that we deserve to be there,” Chester explains. “So that we turn up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender performing the right things on the track. Once we’ve shown that we are a legitimate team, then we want to show forward movement subsequently.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Push
In the summer they signed Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a pair remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two top-tier teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and the Finnish driver expressed the sentiment of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we’re realistic,” he said. “We face a mountain of work to do, and it will likely be almost certainly a difficult start, because this is Formula One. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. I believe with this structure, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we won't be able to progress rapidly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To achieve that goal recruitment has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and intended to reach the goal of 600 rapidly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the phase of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are constructing the plant to manufacture the 2029 engine, scheduled for the 2029 season – until then they will run Ferrari engines – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, different from the direction in F1 for greater centralisation, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred to.
Apollo Blueprint
“We've drawn heavily from the NASA moon mission,” said Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, instead of the traditional management structure, a decentralized management akin to that of NASA's, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on different aspects of the mission in a different facilities.
“In a system where you follow a procedure where a challenge emerges and they report it to their team leader, that manager talks to a manager at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” notes the CTO. “We give authority to team members to take charge. Moving away from hierarchical consent for each action is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The effectiveness of this nimble methodology will be tested in the heat of competition next season and there is a significant degree at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their reserve driver the young Californian Colton Herta
