A little more than twelve months ago at the Vegas Grand Prix, Cadillac were finally given the green light as Formula One’s latest participant for the 2026 season. Establishing the organization from the ground up has entailed a hectic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the NASA lunar mission. As F1 descends on Vegas this race weekend, the team are aware time is getting tight.
The Race Against Time to Australia
At the season finale of the championship to be hosted in the United States, with around three months to go before they take to the track for the first time in Australia at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental endeavor, they are cognizant there will not be enough hours in the day.
The technical director, Nick Chester, joined the embryonic project in early 2023 not long after it was established, when the team were without even an official entry. He has been at its core ever since and enjoys a knowing grin when reflecting on the ride.
“There might be five minutes thinking back at what the team has achieved and say: ‘Amazing, how impressive what we have built in under three years,’” Chester states. “And then the following moment you consider: ‘Yes, we still have quite a lot to do.’”
A Unique Task
Chester had success at Renault in Alonso's championship-winning campaigns of 2005/2006 and was in command of technical direction at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but nothing has been quite like the task of bringing the all-American Cadillac marque, a works entry supported by the owner, General Motors Corporation, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Creating an F1 team from scratch, when will you ever have the possibility to do that?” he observes. “There's nothing comparable. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to alter team culture.”
With each passing day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the approaching critical moment in Melbourne and targets are being managed.
“It's reasonable to expect that any incoming team entering the sport is probably going to finish last but just making it to the starting line will be an accomplishment in itself,” Graeme Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he felt the organization had a reputation to build as well.
“The initial objective we intend to prove is that we should be there,” Chester explains. “So we arrive and we operate well. We want to show that we’re a proper team doing the proper actions on the race track. After we have demonstrated that our credentials are solid, then we will focus on forward movement after that.”
Racing Talent and Team Building Effort
In August they signed Sergio Pérez and Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a duo distinguished for their invaluable experience in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, the Red Bull team and Mercedes-AMG, and Bottas echoed the mood of determined optimism.
“Of course, we’re realistic,” he said. “There’s going to be a mountain of work to do, and it’s going to be probably a tough opening, because it is F1. But we aren't joining to remain at the rear. In my view with this setup, with this team, this staff, there is every reason that we can't manage to advance swiftly up to the pace and enjoy some success.”
To achieve that goal staff acquisition has been in overdrive, with personnel now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to reach the goal of 600 members swiftly. Complementing their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at the Fishers location in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in North Carolina, where they are building the center to build the 2029 engine, scheduled for 2029 – in the meantime they will operate with Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated organization, contrary to the movement in Formula One for more centralization, and has inspired the fresh organizational mindset to which the CTO referred.
Space Mission Inspiration
“It's closely based on the Apollo project,” said Lowdon just before the British GP in the summer. “We’re realistic, we know how difficult it is. The schedules, are incredibly tight. OK, 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 decentralized management akin to that of the space agency's, where there were a assortment of specialist groups all focusing on different aspects of the program across a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a protocol where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their team leader, that manager communicates with a leader somewhere else, it is relayed back, it’s super slow,” notes Chester. “Therefore we enable staff to really get on with it. Avoiding hierarchical consent for each action is far more efficient and quicker.”
What Lies Ahead
The effectiveness of this flexible approach will be proven in the intensity of Grand Prix in 2026 and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have taken on as their reserve driver the emerging American Colton Herta
