Just over twelve months previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were at last awarded the official approval as F1's most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the organization from the ground up has involved a hectic pace of work that the team boss, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Vegas this weekend, the team understand the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the US, with just over a hundred days to go before they hit the circuit for the inaugural time in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will never be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent operation in early 2023 soon after it was created, when the organization were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart from that point and enjoys a amused expression when thinking about the experience.
“You might get five minutes thinking back at what you have accomplished and say: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in a short three-year period,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yeah, there is still a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Challenge
Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's victorious campaigns of the mid-2000s and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has quite compared with the challenge of introducing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team supported by the owner, GM, into Formula One.
“Creating an Formula One team from scratch, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you don’t get the chance to alter organizational mindset.”
With each passing day that elapses minds are sharper on the impending decisive point in Australia and expectations are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad entering the sport is likely to start at the back but simply getting on to the grid will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a statement to make as well.
“Our primary goal we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he says. “So we arrive and we perform competently. We want to show that we’re a proper team performing the proper actions on the track. Once we prove that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Driver Lineup and Team Building Effort
In the summer they contracted Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in competing at the sharp end in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the mood of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a challenging beginning, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we can't manage to progress rapidly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To that end recruitment has been in overdrive, with staff now at more than 400 and intended to hit the goal of 600 quickly. In addition to their current base at Silverstone, the organization are in the midst of building an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, where they are developing the facility to manufacture the power unit, planned for 2029 – for now they will run power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organisation, at odds with the movement in Formula One for increased consolidation, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Chester alluded.
Apollo Model
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked Graeme Lowdon ahead of the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Well, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have implemented, rather than the usual hierarchical system, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all tackling different aspects of the mission at a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where an issue arises and they escalate it to their team leader, that supervisor talks to a leader at a different location, it goes back down the chain, it becomes inefficient,” says Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to handle things directly. Avoiding management approval for everything is much smoother and faster.”
The Future
The efficacy of this agile strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the young American Colton Herta
