Approximately a full year previously at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were finally awarded the go-ahead as F1's newest participant for the 2026 season. Building the organization from nothing has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has equated to the Apollo moon landing. As the sport descends on the Vegas strip this race weekend, the team know time is getting tight.
The Countdown to Melbourne
At the final race of the season to be held in the US, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit 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 never-ending challenge, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its heart since then and gets a amused expression when reflecting on the journey.
“You can have a brief moment thinking back at what the team has achieved and think: ‘Amazing, what an achievement what we have built in under three years,’” he says. “And then the next minute you consider: ‘Yes, there is still a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO had success at the Renault team in Alonso's victorious seasons of the mid-2000s and was in charge of technical development at the recently formed Mercedes Formula E team, but no previous experience has been quite like the mission of launching the all-American Cadillac brand, a works entry sponsored by the owner, GM, into F1.
“Building an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” Chester remarks. “It is like nothing else. In an established team you won't have the possibility to alter cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are more focused on the approaching decisive point in Australia and targets are being set realistically.
“It's reasonable to expect that a brand-new squad coming in is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon noted recently and while the CTO agreed with this sentiment he believed the team had a point to prove as well.
“The initial objective we want to show is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that this is a professional operation doing the right things on the circuit. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate progression after that.”
Pilot Selection and Team Building Drive
In late summer they contracted Checo Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their drivers for 2026, a tandem notable for their vast knowledge in performing at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas expressed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we have a realistic outlook,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and it will likely be most likely a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But we’re not there to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we shouldn’t be able to progress rapidly to a competitive level and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with personnel now at over 400 and planned to hit the goal of six hundred swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at the Silverstone circuit, the team are in the phase of completing an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the General Motors facility in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are developing the facility to produce the power unit, scheduled for 2029 – for now they will operate with power from Ferrari – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Cologne. It is a complex organisation, at odds with the trend in the sport for greater centralisation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Chester referred to.
NASA Inspiration
“We've drawn heavily from the Apollo program,” stated the team principal just before the British GP in the summer. “We are pragmatic, we understand how challenging it is. The schedules, are extremely compressed. Alright, it's not a space expedition, but it can seem that way.”
So they have adopted, instead of the conventional chain of command, a flat management structure akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all working on various components of the mission at a multiple sites.
“If you have to go through a protocol where an issue arises and they escalate it to their supervisor, that supervisor communicates with a supervisor somewhere else, it goes back down the chain, the process is very slow,” says Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
Upcoming Challenges
The success of this nimble methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is no little amount riding on this for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their test driver the emerging Californian Colton Herta
