Approximately a full year previously at the Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as F1's latest participant for 2026. Establishing the squad from scratch has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, Cadillac are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with approximately 100 days to go before they take to the track for the maiden outing in Melbourne at the first race of 2026, Cadillac have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will never be adequate time.
The CTO, Nick Chester, became part of the newly formed operation in the spring of 2023 not long after it was formed, when the team were without even an confirmed place. He has been at its heart ever since and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the journey.
“You can have a brief moment looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he notes. “And then the next minute you think: ‘Yeah, we still have a great deal to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO enjoyed success at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005/2006 and was in command of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes electric racing team, but no previous experience has quite compared with the task of launching the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a works entry supported by the corporate entity, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an Formula One team from the ground up, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he says. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you won't have the possibility to transform cultural approach.”
With each passing day that elapses focus are increasingly concentrated on the impending moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being set realistically.
“One must presume that a brand-new squad joining the grid is probably going to finish last but simply getting on to the grid will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon stated earlier this year and while Chester echoed this he thought the organization had a point to prove as well.
“The first thing we aim to demonstrate is that we should be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we perform competently. We aim to demonstrate that this is a professional operation performing the proper actions on the race track. After we’ve shown that we’re really credible, then we will focus on improvement from there on.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Push
In the summer they recruited Checo Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for the 2026 season, a pair notable for their priceless expertise in competing at the leading positions in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of fighting spirit.
“Of course, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “We face a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to stay at the back. I am confident given this organization, with this group, this staff, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to advance swiftly to the front and achieve good results.”
To realize that ambition hiring has been in overdrive, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to hit the goal of six hundred quickly. Alongside their present headquarters at the UK base, the organization are in the midst of completing an main base at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the center to build the new engine, set for 2029 – for now they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a complex organisation, different from the movement in the sport for more centralization, and has led to the new cultural approach to which Nick Chester referred.
NASA Model
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal shortly before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we know 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 traditional management structure, a flat management structure comparable to that of Nasa’s, where there were a variety of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“When you must follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their supervisor, that manager communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it is relayed back, it becomes inefficient,” explains Nick Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Moving away from management approval for everything is so much cleaner and faster.”
The Future
The success of this nimble strategy will be tested in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is no little amount at stake for Formula One, too. Cadillac have taken on as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
