Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately awarded the go-ahead as Formula One’s latest entry for the 2026 season. Establishing the team from nothing has required a hectic operating tempo that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has compared to the Apollo moon landing. As Formula One arrives on the Vegas strip this weekend, the team know the clock is ticking.
The Countdown to Australia
At the last event 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 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have made significant progress but, in what must seem like a never-ending endeavor, they are aware there will not be enough hours in the day.
The chief technical officer, Nick Chester, joined the newly formed project in early 2023 not long after it was formed, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its heart from that point and has a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“You might get a brief moment looking back at what you’ve done and say: ‘Amazing, isn’t this fantastic what the team has created in under three years,’” he says. “Then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we’ve still got a significant amount to do.’”
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The CTO had success at Renault in Fernando Alonso’s victorious years of 2005 and 2006 and was in control of technical development at the new Mercedes-Benz Formula E team, but no other project has quite compared with the mission of bringing the quintessentially American Cadillac brand, a factory team backed by the parent company, GM, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Establishing an F1 team from nothing, how often do you get the opportunity to do that?” he observes. “It's unparalleled. In an existing team you don’t get the possibility to change cultural approach.”
With every day that elapses minds are sharper on the approaching moment of truth in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“It's reasonable to expect that any new team coming in is likely to start at the back but just making it to the starting line will be an feat in itself,” Lowdon noted this year and while Chester echoed this he believed the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“Our primary goal we aim to demonstrate 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 correct procedures on the track. Once we have demonstrated that we’re really credible, then we aim to demonstrate progression subsequently.”
Pilot Selection and Recruitment Push
In the summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their pilots for 2026, a duo remarkable for their invaluable experience in competing at the leading positions in two championship-winning squads, Red Bull Racing and the Mercedes team, and Bottas echoed the sentiment of fighting spirit.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it’s going to be most likely a challenging beginning, because it's the top level of motorsport. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with these individuals, these personnel, there is every reason that we won't be able to get relatively quickly up to the pace and achieve good results.”
To that end staff acquisition has been in full swing, with staff now reaching more than 400 and scheduled to attain the objective of six hundred swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the team are in the phase of building an main base at Fishers, Indiana in the Indianapolis area and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are developing the plant to manufacture the new engine, planned for 2029 – until then they will operate with Ferrari power units – and the Toyota's wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, at odds with the trend in F1 for more centralization, and has prompted the innovative team culture to which Nick Chester referred.
Space Mission Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project,” remarked Graeme Lowdon just before the British Grand Prix in the summer. “We’re realistic, we recognize how tough it is. The deadlines, are extremely compressed. Well, it's not a space expedition, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have adopted, rather than the conventional chain of command, a decentralized management comparable to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of Apollo teams all working on distinct elements of the mission at a variety of locations.
“When you must follow a process where someone has a problem and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it becomes inefficient,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable team members to handle things directly. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible strategy will be tested in the heat of competition when the season begins and there is a considerable amount on the line for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their reserve driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
