Just over a full year ago at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the green light as Formula One’s most recent entrant for 2026. Establishing the squad from nothing has required a intense pace of work that the principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As the sport converges on Vegas this race weekend, Cadillac are aware time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the season finale of the season to be staged in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, Cadillac have come on in leaps and bounds but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic team in March 2023 shortly after it was formed, when the squad were without even an official entry. He has been at its core since then and has a amused expression when reflecting on the experience.
“You can have five minutes looking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Wow, what an achievement what the team has created in less than three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Task
The CTO enjoyed success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning campaigns of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the recently formed Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac marque, a factory team backed by the corporate entity, GM, into F1.
“Creating an Formula One team from the ground up, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that passes thoughts are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and expectations are being set realistically.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester agreed with this sentiment he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So that we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we are a serious contender executing the correct procedures on the race track. When we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate forward movement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Drive
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes, and Valtteri Bottas reflected the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” he commented. “We face a mountain of work to do, and we expect probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we’re not there to remain at the rear. I am confident given this organization, with these individuals, these people, it's entirely possible we won't be able to get relatively quickly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To realize that ambition recruitment has been in top gear, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and intended to reach the objective of 600 quickly. In addition to their present headquarters at the UK base, the squad are in the process of finishing an HQ at the Fishers location in the Indianapolis area and there is the General Motors facility in North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, set for the 2029 season – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the aerodynamic facility in Cologne. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the movement in Formula One for greater centralisation, and has prompted the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred.
Apollo Model
“It's closely based on the NASA moon mission,” stated Lowdon shortly before the British Grand Prix in July. “We have a clear-eyed view, we understand how tough it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it can seem that way.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the usual hierarchical system, a flat management structure comparable to that of NASA's, where there were a assortment of project teams all working on distinct elements of the mission across a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that supervisor talks to a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable people to really get on with it. Avoiding management approval for all decisions is much smoother and faster.”
What Lies Ahead
The success of this flexible approach will be evaluated in the pressure of racing when the season begins and there is a significant degree riding on this for F1, too. The Cadillac team have recruited as their development driver the young American Colton Herta
